The Traveling Man had come in through the front door. There was no sign of forced entry. The hallway was now empty. Mickey compared it with the first of the photographs that he had brought with him. He had ordered them carefully, numbering them on the back. The first showed the hallway as it had once been: a bookcase on the right, and a coat rack. On the floor was a mahogany flower stand, and beside it a broken flowerpot and a plant of some kind, its roots exposed. Behind the plant, the first of the stairs leading up to the second floor. Three bedrooms there, one no larger than a storage room, and a single small bathroom. Mickey didn’t want to go up there just yet. Jennifer Parker, three years old, had been asleep on the couch in the living room when the killer entered. She had a weak heart, and it spared her the agony of what was to come. Between the time that the killer entered and the final display of the bodies, she had suffered a massive release of epinephrine into her system, resulting in ventricular fibrillation of the heart. In other words, Jennifer Parker had died of fright.
Her mother had not been so lucky. There had been a struggle, probably near the kitchen. She had managed to get away from her attacker, but only momentarily. He had caught up with her in the hall, and had stunned her by banging her face against the wall. Mickey moved on to the next photograph: a smear of blood on the wall to his left. He found what he believed to be the spot, and ran his fingers across it. Then he knelt down and examined the floorboards, trailing his hand along the wood, just as Susan Parker had done as she was dragged back to the kitchen. The hallway had been only partially carpeted, leaving the edges of the boards exposed on either side. It was here, somewhere, that Susan had lost her fingernail.
Was her daughter dead by then, or had the sight of her mother, dazed and bleeding, triggered the attack that led to Jennifer’s death? Maybe she had fought to save her mother. Yes, that was probably it, Mickey thought, already piecing together the most favorable narrative, the most gripping version he could find of the story. There had been rope marks on the child’s wrists and ankles, indicating that she had been restrained at some point. She woke, realized what was happening, tried to scream, to fight. A blow was struck, knocking her to the ground; just such an injury had been recorded in the autopsy. Once her mother had been subdued, the killer restrained the daughter in turn, but by then the girl was already dying. Mickey glanced into the living room, now furnished only with dust and discarded paper and dead insects. Another photograph, this time of the couch. There was a doll lying on it, half obscured by a blanket.
Mickey moved on, trying to visualize the scene as Parker had experienced it. Blood on the walls and on the floor; the kitchen door almost closed; the house cold. He took a deep breath, and turned to the final photograph: Susan Parker on a pine chair, her arms tied behind her back, her feet bound separately to the front legs, her head down, her face obscured by her hair, so that the damage to the face and eyes was not visible, not from this angle. Her daughter lay across her mother’s thighs. Not so much blood on her. Her throat had been cut, as was her mother’s, but by then Jennifer was already dead. Light shone through what seemed at first glance to be a thin cloak laid across Susan Parker’s arms, but which Mickey knew to be her own skin, pulled back to complete the macabre pietà.
With the image clear in his head, Mickey opened the kitchen door, ready to impose this old vision of hell on the empty room.
Except now the room was not empty. The back door was half open, and there was a figure in the shadows behind it, watching him.
Mickey stumbled back in shock, his hand instinctively raised to his heart.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What—’
The figure moved forward, and was caught by the moonlight.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Mickey as, unbeknownst to him, the final sands of his life began slipping through his fingers. ‘I know you . . .’
22
Jimmy had moved on to coffee, enlivened by a glass of brandy. I stuck with coffee alone, but I barely touched it. I tried to pinpoint how I was feeling, but at first there was only a numbness that gradually gave way to a kind of sadness and loneliness. I thought of all that my parents had endured, of my father’s lies and betrayal and my mother’s pain. For now, my only regret was that they were no longer there for me, that I could not go to them and tell them that I understood, that it was all okay. Had they lived, I wondered when, or if, they would together have told me of the circumstances of my birth, and I recognized that, coming from them, the details would have been more difficult to bear, and my reactions would have been more extreme. Sitting in Jimmy Gallagher’s candlelit kitchen, watching his wine-stained lips move, I felt that I was listening to the story of another man’s life, one with whom I shared certain qualities but who was, ultimately, distant from me.
With each word that he spoke, Jimmy seemed to relax a little more, but he also appeared to be growing older, although I knew it was only a trick of the light. He had lived to be a repository of secrets; now, as they seeped from him at last, so some of his life force went with them.
He sipped his brandy. ‘Like I said, there’s not much more to tell.’
Not much more to tell. Only the story of my father’s final day, and the blood that he shed, and the reasons why.
Not much more to tell. Only everything.
∗ ∗ ∗
Jimmy and Will kept their distance from each other after Will and Elaine returned from Maine with their new child, and they spoke to no one else of what they knew. Then, one December night, Jimmy and Will got drunk together at Chumley’s and the White Horse, and Will thanked Jimmy for all that he had done, for his loyalty and his friendship and for killing the woman who had taken Caroline’s life.
‘You think of her?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Caroline?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sometimes. More than sometimes.’
‘Did you love her?’
‘I don’t know. If I didn’t then, I do now. Does that make any sense?’
‘As much as anything does. You ever visit the grave?’
‘Just a couple of times since the funeral.’
Jimmy remembered the funeral, in a quiet corner of Bayside Cemetery. Caroline had told Will that she didn’t have much time for organized religion. Her folks had been Protestants of some stripe, so they found a minister who said the right things as she and the child were laid in the ground. Will, Jimmy, and the rabbi, Epstein, were the only other people in attendance. Epstein had told them that the male infant had come from one of the hospitals in the city. His mother had been a junkie, and the kid hadn’t lived for more than a couple of hours after he was born. The mother didn’t care that her child was dead or, if she did, she didn’t show it. She would later, Jimmy believed. He couldn’t countenance the possibility that a woman, no matter how sick or high she was, could remain untroubled by the death of her child. Elaine’s own labor had been discreetly induced while she was in Maine. There had been no formal burial. After she had made the decision to stay with Will, and to protect the child cut from Caroline Carr, Epstein had spoken with her over the phone, and had made her understand how important it was that everyone believed Caroline’s child was Elaine’s own. She had been given time to mourn her own baby, to cradle the small, dead thing in her arms, and then it was taken from her.
‘I’d go more often, but it upsets Elaine,’ said Will.
I’ll bet it does, thought Jimmy. He didn’t know how the marriage had survived and, from the hints Will had dropped, it wasn’t entirely certain that it would survive. Still, Jimmy’s respect for Elaine Parker had only grown in the aftermath of what had occurred. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she felt as she looked at her husband, and at the child she was raising as her own. He wondered if she could yet even distinguish hatred from love.
‘I always bring two bunches of flowers,’ continued Will. ‘One for Caroline, and one for the kid they buried with her. Epstein said it was important. It had to look like I was mourning both of them, just in case.’
‘In case what?’
‘In case someone is watching,’ said Will.
‘They’re gone,’ said Jimmy. ‘You saw them both die.’
‘Epstein thinks there might be others. Worse than that . . .’
He stopped talking.
‘What could be worse?’ asked Jimmy.
‘That, somehow, they might come back.’
‘What does that mean, “come back”?’
‘Doesn’t matter. The rabbi’s fantasies.’
‘Jesus. Fantasies is right.’
Jimmy raised his hand for another round of drinks.
‘And the woman, the one I shot? What did they do with her?’
‘They burned her body, and scattered the ashes. You know, now I’d like to have taken a minute with her, before she died.’
‘So you could have asked her why,’ said Jimmy.
‘Yes.’
‘She wouldn’t have told you anything. I could see it in her eyes. And—’
‘Go on.’
‘It’ll sound strange.’
Will laughed. ‘After all that we’ve been through, could anything sound strange?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘So?’
‘She wasn’t afraid to die.’
‘She was a fanatic. Fanatics are too crazy to be afraid.’
‘No, it was more than that. I thought, just before I fired, that she smiled at me, as if it didn’t matter if I killed her or not. And that stuff about being “beyond your law.” Jesus, she gave me the creeps.’
‘She was sure that she’d done what she came to do. As far as she was concerned, Caroline was dead and so was her baby.’
Jimmy frowned. ‘Maybe,’ he said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it, and he wondered at what Epstein had told Will, about how they might come back, but he couldn’t figure out what that might mean, and Will wouldn’t tell him.
In the years that followed, they rarely discussed the subject. Epstein did not contact either Will or Jimmy, although Will thought that he had sometimes seen the rabbi when Will took his family into the city to shop or to see a movie or a show. Epstein never acknowledged his presence on those occasions, and Will did not approach him, but he had the sense that Epstein, both in person and through others, was keeping an eye on Will, his wife, and, most especially, his son.
Only rarely would Will tell Jimmy of the state of his relationship with his wife. It had never recovered from his betrayal, and he knew that it never would, yet at least they were still together. But there were times when his wife would be distant from him, both emotionally and physically, for weeks on end. She struggled, too, with their son or, as she would throw at Will when her rage and hurt got the upper hand, ‘your son.’ But, slowly, that began to change, for the boy knew no mother but her. Will thought that the turning point came when Charlie, then eight years old, was struck by a car while learning to ride his new bike around the neighborhood. Elaine was in the yard when it happened, saw the car strike the bike and the boy fly into the air and land hard upon the road. As she ran, she heard him calling for her: not for his father, to whom he seemed naturally to turn for so many things, but for her. His left arm was badly broken – she could see that as soon as she reached him – and there was blood pouring from a wound in his scalp. He was struggling to remain conscious, and something told her that it was important for him to stay with her, that he should not close his eyes. She called his name, over and over, as she took a coat from the driver of the car and, gently, placed it under the boy’s head. She was crying, and he saw that she was crying.
‘Mommy,’ he said. ‘Mommy, I’m sorry.’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.’
And she stayed with him, kneeling over him, whispering his name, the palm of her hand caressing his face; and she sat beside him in the ambulance; and she sat outside the theater as they operated on him to stitch his scalp and set his arm; and hers was the first face he saw when he came to.
After that, things were better between them.
‘My father told you all this?’
‘No,’ said Jimmy. ‘She told me, after he died. She said you were all that she had left of him, but that wasn’t why she loved you. She loved you because you were her child. She was the only mother you knew, and you were the only son she had. She said that she’d sometimes forgotten that, or didn’t want to believe it, but as time went by she realized the truth of it.’
He got up to go to the bathroom. I remained seated thinking of my mother in her final days, lying in her hospital bed, so altered by the disease that I hadn’t recognized her when I had first entered her room, believing instead that the nurse had made some mistake when she directed me down the corridor. But then she made a small gesture in her sleep, a raising of her right hand, and even in her illness the grace of it was familiar, and in that moment I knew it was her. In the days that followed, as I waited for her to die, she had only a few hours of lucidity. Her voice was almost gone, and it seemed to pain her to speak, so instead I read to her from my college texts: poetry, short stories, snippets from the newspaper that I knew would interest her. Her father had come down from Maine, and we would talk to each other as she dozed between us.
Did she consider, as she felt the darkness clouding her consciousness like ink through water, telling me all that she had withheld from me? I am sure that she did, but I understand now why she did not. I think that she may also have warned my grandfather to say nothing, because she believed that if I knew the truth then I might begin digging.
And if I began digging, I would draw them to me.
When Jimmy returned from the bathroom, I saw that he had splashed water on his face, but he had not dried it properly, and the drops looked like tears.
‘On that last night . . .’ he began.
They were in Cal’s together, Jimmy and Will, celebrating Jimmy’s birthday. Some things had changed in the Ninth, but they were still the same in many ways. There were galleries where once there had been dive bars and deserted buildings, and shaky underground movies were being shown in empty storefronts that were now functioning as avant-garde theaters. A lot of the old places were still there, although their time, too, would soon come to an end, some of them with shadows cast over the memories of them. At Second and Fifth, the Binibon was still serving greasy chicken salad, but now people looked at the Binibon and recalled how, in 1981, one of its customers had been Jack Henry Abbott, writer and ex-con who had been championed by Norman Mailer, who had worked for his release. One night, Abbott got into an argument with a waiter, asked him to step outside, and then stabbed him to death. Jimmy and Will had been among those cleaning up the aftermath, the two men, like the precinct that they worked, both changed yet still the same, altered in aspect but still in uniform. They had never made sergeant, and they never would. That was the price that they had paid for what had happened on the night Caroline Carr died.
They were still good cops, though, one of the small cadre of city, transit, and housing officers who did more than the minimum, fighting the general strain of apathy that had infected the force, in part a consequence of a widespread belief that the suits and brass at the Puzzle Palace, as One Police Plaza was known to the rank and file, were out to get them. It wasn’t entirely untrue either. Make too many drug busts and you attracted the attention of your superiors for all the wrong reasons. Make too many arrests and, because of the overtime payments required to process them and see them through court, you were accused of taking money from the pockets of other cops. Best to keep your head down until you could cash out at twenty. The result was that there were now fewer and fewer older cops to act as mentors to the new recruits. By virtue of their years on the force, Jimmy and Will practically qualified as village elders. They had become part of the plainclothes Anticrime Unit, a dangerous assignment that involved patrolling high-crime areas waiting for signs that something was about to go off, usually a gun. For the first time, both were
talking seriously about cashing out.
Somehow, they had found a quiet corner away from the rest, cut off by a raucous throng of men and women in business suits celebrating an office promotion. After that night, Will Parker would be dead, and Jimmy Gallagher would never set foot in Cal’s again. After Will’s death, he found that he could not remember the good times he had enjoyed there. They were gone, excised from his memory. Instead there was only Will with a cold one at his elbow, his hand raised to make a point that would remain forever unspoken, his expression changing as he looked over Jimmy’s shoulder and saw who had entered the bar. Jimmy had turned around to see what he was looking at, but by then Epstein was beside them, and Jimmy knew that something was very wrong.
‘You have to go home,’ said Epstein to Will. He was smiling, but his words gave the lie to his smile, and he did not look at Will as he spoke. To a casual observer, he would have appeared only to be examining the bottles behind the bar, choosing his poison before he joined the company. He wore a white raincoat buttoned to the neck, and on his head was a brown hat with a red feather in the band. He had aged greatly since Jimmy had last seen him at Caroline Carr’s funeral.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Will. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Not here,’ said Epstein, as he was jostled by Perrson, the big Swede who was the linchpin of the Cabaret Unit. It was a Thursday night, and Cal’s was buzzing. Perrson, who stood taller than anyone else in the bar, was handing shots of booze over the heads of those behind him, sometimes baptizing them a little along the way.
‘God bless you, my son,’ he said as someone protested. He guffawed at his own joke, then recognized Jimmy.
‘Hey, it’s the birthday boy!’
But Jimmy was already moving past him, following another man, and Perrson thought that it might have been Will Parker, but later, when questioned, he would claim to have been mistaken, or confused about the time. It might have been later when he saw Jimmy, and Will could not have been with him, because Will would have been on his way back to Pearl River by then.