The Charlie Parker Collection 2

  Travis and Santos exchanged a look.

  ‘Where was it?’ I said.

  ‘On his chest,’ said Santos. ‘Written in blood. We’ve been warned to keep quiet about it. I guess I’m telling you because . . .’ He thought about it. ‘Well, I don’t know why I’m telling you.’

  ‘So what was all that about in there? You don’t believe this was a hate crime. You know this is connected to Wallace’s death.’

  ‘We just wanted to hear your side of the story first,’ said Travis. ‘It’s called “detecting.” We ask you questions, you don’t answer them, we get frustrated. I hear it’s an established pattern with you.’

  ‘We know what the symbol means,’ said Santos, ignoring Travis. ‘We found a guy at the Institute of Advanced Theology who explained it for us.’

  ‘It’s the Enochian “A,”’ I said.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Not long. I didn’t know when you showed it to me.’

  ‘What are we looking at?’ asked Travis, calming down some now that he realized that neither Santos nor I was going to be drawn by his baiting. ‘A cult? Ritual killings?’

  ‘And what’s the connection to you, beyond the fact that you knew both of the victims?’ asked Santos.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

  ‘Why not just torture you?’ said Travis. ‘I mean, I could understand the impulse.’

  I ignored him.

  ‘There’s a man named Asa Durand. He lives out in Pearl River.’ I gave them the address. ‘He says a guy was casing his property a while back, and asking about what happened there. Asa Durand lives in the house where I lived before my father killed himself. Might be worth sending out a sketch artist to test Durand’s memory.’

  Santos took a long drag on his cigarette, and expelled some of the smoke in my direction.

  ‘Those things will kill you,’ I said.

  ‘I was you, I’d worry about my own mortality,’ said Santos. ‘I assume that you’re lying low, but turn your damn cell phone back on. Don’t make us haul you in and lock you up for your own protection.’

  ‘We’re letting him walk?’ asked Travis incredulously.

  ‘I think he’s told us all that he’s going to for now,’ said Santos. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr. Parker? And it’s more than we could get from our own people.’

  ‘Unit Five,’ I said.

  Santos looked surprised. ‘You know what it is?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Some kind of security clearance that a regular wage earner like me doesn’t have, I guess.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. I don’t know much more about it than you do.’

  ‘Somehow, I don’t believe that’s true, but I suppose that all we can do now is wait, because my guess is that your name is on the same list that Jimmy Gallagher and Mickey Wallace were on. When whoever killed them gets around to you, either someone will be tagging your toe, or theirs. Come on, we’ll give you a ride to the subway. The sooner you’re out of Brooklyn, the happier I’ll be.’

  They dropped me at the subway station.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ said Santos.

  ‘Dead or alive,’ said Travis.

  I watched them drive away. They hadn’t spoken to me in the car, and I hadn’t cared. I was too busy thinking about the word that had been carved into Jimmy Gallagher’s back. How had his killer come to the conclusion that Jimmy was gay? He had kept his secrets close all his life; his own, and those of others. I only became aware of his sexuality from things my mother said after my father’s death, when I was a little older and a little more mature, and she had assured me that few of Jimmy’s colleagues had known about it. In fact, she said, only two people knew for certain that Jimmy was gay.

  One of them was my father.

  The other was Eddie Grace.

  32

  A manda Grace answered the door. Her hair was loosely tied with a red band, and her face bore no trace of cosmetics. She was wearing a pair of sweatpants and an old shirt, and she was bathed in perspiration. In her right hand she held a kitchen plunger.

  ‘Great,’ she said, when she saw me. ‘Just great.’

  ‘I take it this isn’t a good time.’

  ‘You could have called ahead first. I might even have had time to put the plunger away.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to your father again.’

  She stepped back, inviting me inside.

  ‘He was real tired after your last visit,’ she said. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘It’s about Jimmy Gallagher, isn’t it?’

  ‘In a way.’

  I followed her into the kitchen. There was a pungent smell coming from the sink, and I could see dirty water that wasn’t draining.

  ‘Something’s backed up down there,’ she said. She handed over the plunger. I slipped off my jacket and went to work on the sink, while she rested a hip against the sideboard and watched.

  ‘What’s going on, Charlie?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We watch the news. We saw what happened at your old home, and we heard about Jimmy. They’re connected, aren’t they?’

  I could feel the water starting to move. I stepped back and watched it disappear down the sink.

  ‘Did your father have anything to say about it?’

  ‘He seemed sad about Jimmy. They used to be friends.’

  ‘Any idea why they fell out?’

  She looked away. ‘I don’t think my father liked the way Jimmy lived his life.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  ‘No, I guessed it for myself. You still haven’t answered my question. What’s going on?’

  I turned to her, and held her gaze until she looked away.

  ‘Damn you,’ she said.

  ‘Like I told you, I’d appreciate a few minutes with Eddie.’

  She wiped a hand across her brow, her frustration palpable. ‘He’s awake, but he’s still in bed. It’ll take him a while to get dressed.’

  ‘There’s no need to go to that trouble. I can talk to him in his room. It won’t take long.’

  She still seemed to be debating the wisdom of allowing me to see him. I could sense her unease.

  ‘You’re different today,’ she said.

  ‘From?’

  ‘From the last time you were here. I don’t think I like it.’

  ‘I need to talk to him, Amanda. Then I’ll be gone, and it won’t matter if you ever liked me.’

  She nodded. ‘Upstairs. Second door on the right. Knock before you go in.’

  My tapping on Eddie Grace’s door was answered by a hoarse croak. The drapes were closed in the room, and it stank of illness and decay. Eddie Grace’s head was supported by a pair of large white pillows. He wore blue-striped pajamas, and the dim light somehow accentuated the pallor of his skin, so that he seemed almost to glow where he lay. I closed the door behind me and looked down on him.

  ‘You came back,’ he said. There was a hint of what might have been a smile on his face, but there was no joy to it. Instead, it was a knowing, unpleasant thing, an expression of malevolence. ‘I figured you would.’

  ‘Why?’

  He didn’t even try to lie.

  ‘Because they’re coming for you, and you’re scared.’

  ‘Do you know what was done to Jimmy?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘He was carved up. He was tortured and then killed, all because he kept his secrets, all because he was a friend to my father and to me.’

  ‘He should have picked his friends more carefully.’

  ‘I guess so. You were his friend.’

  Eddie laughed softly. It sounded like air being forced from a corpse, and smelled just as bad. It brought on a fit of coughing, and he gestured for the covered plastic cup on the bedside locker, the kind that little children used with a raised, perforated lip from which to drink. I held it for him as he sucked from it. O
ne of his hands touched mine, and I was surprised by how cold it was.

  ‘I was his friend,’ said Eddie. ‘Then he had to tell your father and me about himself, and after that I cut him loose. He was a faggot, barely a man. He disgusted me.’

  ‘So you cut him off ?’

  ‘I’d have cut his balls off if I could. I’d have told everyone what he was. He shouldn’t have been allowed to wear that uniform.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘Because they didn’t want me to.’

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘Anmael, and Semjaza, although that wasn’t what they called themselves, not the first time they came to me. I never found out the woman’s name. She never said much. The man was called Peter, but later I found out his true name. He did most of the talking.’

  ‘How did they find you?’

  ‘I had weaknesses. Not like Jimmy’s. I had a man’s weaknesses. I liked them young.’

  He smiled again. His lips were cracked, and his remaining teeth were rotting in their gums.

  ‘Girls, not boys,’ he continued. ‘Never boys. They found out. That’s what they do: they find your weaknesses, and they use them against you. A carrot and a stick: they threatened to expose me, but if I helped them, then they’d help me in turn. They came to me after your father started seeing Caroline Carr. I didn’t know what they were, not then, but I learned.’ His eyes flickered, and for a moment he looked frightened. ‘Oh, I learned. I told them about the Carr woman. I knew about her: I was partnered with your father one day, after he met her, and I saw them together.

  ‘Anmael wanted to know where she was. I didn’t ask why. I found out where Will had stashed her on the Upper East Side. Then Anmael died, and the woman disappeared. They kept moving Caroline Carr around after that, your father and Jimmy, but they did it quietly. I told Semjaza to follow Jimmy, because your father trusted him more than anyone else. I thought that they just wanted to follow her, maybe steal the child. I was as surprised as anyone when they killed her.’

  It was strange, but I believed him. He had no reason to lie, not now, and he was not seeking absolution. He spoke of it as if it were an event that he had witnessed, but in which he had played no direct part.

  ‘When Will came back from Maine with a baby boy, I was suspicious. I knew all about his wife’s medical history, about the problems she’d had conceiving, and carrying, a child. It was all too neat. But by then I’d fallen out with Jimmy. I was still on good terms with your old man, or I thought I was, but something changed between us. I suppose Jimmy must have spoken to him, and he chose Jimmy over me. I didn’t care. Fuck him. Fuck ’em both.

  ‘I heard nothing for maybe fifteen years. I didn’t expect anything else. After all, they were dead, Anmael and the woman, and I’d found ways to keep myself satisfied without them.

  ‘Then a boy and a girl showed up at my place. They sat outside in a car, watching the house. I was bowling, and my wife called me, told me she was worried. I came home, and I swear I knew it was them. I knew before they even showed me the marks on their arms, before they started talking about things that must have happened before they were born, conversations that I’d had with Anmael and the woman before they died. I mean, it was them, in another form. I didn’t doubt it. I could see it in their eyes. I told them what I believed about the boy Will and his wife were raising, but they already seemed to have their own suspicions. That was what had brought them back. They knew that the boy was still alive, that you were still alive.

  ‘So I helped them again, and still you wouldn’t die.’

  His eyes closed. I thought he might have drifted off to sleep, but then he spoke, his eyes still shut.

  ‘I cried when your old man killed himself,’ he said. ‘I liked him, even if he did cut me loose. Why couldn’t you just have died back in that clinic? If you had, then it would all have ended there and then. You just won’t die.’

  His eyes opened again.

  ‘But this time it’s different. They’re not kids hunting you, and they’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about them: they remember. Each time, they’ve come a little bit closer to succeeding, but it’s urgent now. They want you dead.’

  ‘Why?’

  He stared at me, his eyebrows raised. He looked amused. ‘I don’t think they know,’ he said. ‘You might as well ask why a white blood cell attacks an infection. It’s what it’s programmed to do: to fight a threat, and neutralize it. Not mine, though. Mine are screwed.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I’ve only seen him. The other, the woman, she wasn’t there. He was waiting for her, willing her to come to him. That’s the way they are. They live for each other.’

  ‘Who is he? What’s he calling himself ?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

  ‘He came here?’

  ‘No, it was while I was still in the hospital, but not so long ago. He brought me candy. It was like meeting an old friend.’

  ‘Did you feed Jimmy to him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have to. They knew all about Jimmy from way back.’

  ‘Because of you.’

  ‘What does it matter now?’

  ‘It mattered to Jimmy. Do you know how much he suffered before he died?’

  Eddie waved a hand in a gesture of dismissal, but he would not meet my eyes.

  ‘Describe him to me.’

  He indicated once again that he needed water, and I gave it to him. His voice had grown hoarser and hoarser as he spoke. Now it was barely a whisper.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell you. And, anyway, do you really think any of this will help you? I wouldn’t tell you anything if I thought it would. I don’t care about you, or about what happened to Jimmy. I’m almost done with this life. I’ve been promised my reward for what I’ve done.’

  He lifted his head from the pillow, as though to confide some great secret. ‘Their master is good and kind,’ he said, almost to himself, then sank back on the bed, exhausted. His breathing grew shallower, and he drifted off to sleep.

  Amanda was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Her lips were set so firmly that there were wrinkles around her mouth.

  ‘Did you get what you wanted from him?’

  ‘Yes. Confirmation.’

  ‘He’s an old man. Whatever he did in the past, he’s paid more than enough for it in suffering.’

  ‘You know, Amanda, I don’t believe that’s true.’

  Her face flushed red.

  ‘Get out of here. The best thing you ever did was leave this town.’

  And that much, at least, was true.

  33

  The woman who was now Emily Kindler in name only arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal two days after Jimmy Gallagher was killed. After leaving the bar, she had spent an entire day alone in her little apartment, ignoring the ringing of the telephone, her date with Chad now forgotten, Chad himself reduced to nothing more than a fleeting memory from another life. Once, the doorbell rang downstairs, but she did not answer it. Instead, she reconstructed past lives, and thought about the man whom she had seen on the TV screen in the bar, and she knew that when she found him, then so too would she find her beloved.

  Using a poker, she carefully burnt her flesh. She knew the exact place upon which to work, for she could almost see the pattern hiding beneath her skin. When she was done, she bore the old mark.

  In time, she left for the city.

  At the bus station, it took her almost an hour of looking lost before she was approached. While she was freshening up for the third time in the women’s restroom, a young woman not much older than she was approached her and asked if she was okay. The woman’s name was Carole Coemer, but everyone called her Cassie. She was blond and pretty and clean, and looked nineteen even though she was actually twenty-seven. Her job was to scout the bus station for new female arrivals, particularly those who looked lost or alone, and befriend them. She would tell them that she was new i
n town herself, and offer to buy them a cup of coffee, or something to eat. Cassie always carried a backpack, even though it was filled with newspapers topped off with a pair of jeans and some underwear and T-shirts, just in case she had to open it to convince the more skeptical of the waifs and strays.

  If they didn’t have somewhere to stay, or if nobody was really expecting them in town, she would propose that they spend the night with a friend of Cassie’s and then try to find somewhere more long term the next day. Cassie’s friend was called Earle Yiu, and he maintained a number of cheap apartments across the city, but the principal one was on Thirty-eighth and Ninth, above a grimy bar called the Yellow Pearl, which was also owned by Earle Yiu. This was a little joke on Earle’s part, as he was part Japanese and ‘Yellow Pearl’ wasn’t a million miles removed from ‘Yellow Peril.’ Earle was very good at assessing the vulnerabilities of young women, although not quite as good as Cassie Coemer who, even Earle had to admit, was a predator of the first degree.

  So Cassie would take the girl – or girls, if her day had been particularly productive – to meet Earle, and Earle would welcome them, and arrange to have food delivered or, if he was in the mood, he sometimes cooked for the girls himself. It would usually be something simple and tasty, like teriyaki with rice. Beers would be offered, and a little pot, maybe even something stronger. Then Earle, if he thought the new arrival was suitable and sufficiently vulnerable, would offer to let her and Cassie stay in the apartment for a couple of days, telling them to take it easy, that he knew someone who might be looking for waitresses. The next day, Cassie would drift away, isolating the new arrival.

  After two or three days, Earle’s disposition would alter. He would arrive early in the morning, or late at night, and wake the girl. He would demand payment for his hospitality, and when the girl couldn’t pay – and they could never pay enough to satisfy Earle – he would make his move. Most ended up turning tricks, once Earle and his buddies had broken them in first, if that was necessary, usually in one of Earle’s other apartments. Particularly promising candidates would be sold off elsewhere, or escorted to other cities and towns where new blood was scarce. The most unfortunate simply disappeared off the face of the earth, for Earle knew men (and some women) with very particular needs.