The Charlie Parker Collection 2

  “Do you think he enabled others to do so, perhaps by feeding them information about the identities and whereabouts of vulnerable patients?”

  “My father was devoted to his work. When they stopped sending children to him for evaluation, it was because it was felt that he was no longer sufficiently objective. His inclination was to believe the children from the outset, and that was what got him into trouble. He knew what adults were capable of doing.”

  “Did your father have many close friends?”

  Her brow furrowed.

  “A few. There were some professional colleagues too, although most didn’t stay in touch after he disappeared. They wanted to put as much distance as possible between my father and themselves. I didn’t blame them.”

  “I’d like you to make a list: business associates; college buddies; people from the old neighborhood; anyone with whom he maintained regular contact.”

  “I’ll do it as soon as I get home.”

  “By the way, you didn’t tell me that you were once married.”

  She looked surprised. “How did you find out?”

  “Merrick told me.”

  “Jesus. It didn’t seem important to tell you. It didn’t last long. I don’t see him anymore.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jerry. Jerry Legere.”

  “And he wasn’t Jenna’s father?”

  “No.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “He’s an electrician. He works all over. Why do you want to talk to him?”

  “I’m going to talk to a lot of people. That’s how these things work.”

  “But that’s not going to make this man, this Merrick, go away.” Her voice was rising again. “That’s not why I hired you.”

  “He’s not going to go away, Miss Clay, not yet. He’s angry, and that anger has something to do with your father. I need to find out the connection between your father and Merrick. To do that, I’m going to have to ask a lot of questions.”

  She folded her arms on the roof of her car and laid her forehead against them.

  “I don’t want this to drag on,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her posture. “I want things to go back to the way they were. Do what you have to do, talk to whomever, but make it stop. Please. I don’t even know where my ex-husband lives anymore, but he used to do some work for a company called A-Secure and he probably still does. They install security systems in businesses and homes. A friend of Jerry’s, Raymon Lang, does a lot of the maintenance on the systems, and he used to put business Jerry’s way. You’ll probably find Jerry through A-Secure.”

  “Merrick thinks that you and your ex-husband might have spoken about your father sometime in the past.”

  “Well, of course we did, but Jerry doesn’t know anything about what happened to him. I can tell you that for sure. The only person Jerry Legere ever cared about was himself. I think he believed that my father would turn up dead somewhere and he could start spending the money that would come to me.”

  “Was your father wealthy?”

  “There’s a good six-figure sum still tied up in probate, so, yes, I suppose you could say that he was comfortable. Then there’s the house. Jerry wanted me to sell it, but obviously I couldn’t because it wasn’t mine to sell. In the end, Jerry just got tired of waiting, and of me. It was mutual, though. Jerry wasn’t exactly a great catch.”

  “One last thing,” I said. “Did you ever hear your father mention something about a ‘project,’ or ‘the Project’?”

  “No, never.”

  “Have you any idea what that might mean?”

  “None.”

  She raised her head and got into her car. I stayed behind her all the way to her office, then remained there until it was time for her to collect Jenna. The principal escorted the girl to the door of the school, and Rebecca spent a little time talking to him, presumably to explain why Jenna would not be at school for a while, then I followed them both back to the house. Rebecca parked in the drive and kept the car doors locked while I checked every room. I went back to the front door and indicated that everything was okay. Once she was inside, I sat in the kitchen and watched while she put together a list of her father’s friends and colleagues. It wasn’t very long. Some, she said, were dead, and others she could not remember. I asked her to let me know if she thought of any additions and she assured me that she would. I told her that I would deal with the issue of extra protection that evening, and would call her with the details before she went to bed that night. With that, I left her. I heard her turning the key in the lock behind me, and a series of electronic beeps as she entered the alarm code to secure the house.

  Already, the daylight had departed. The waves broke on the shore as I walked to my car. Usually, I found it restful, but not now. There was an element missing, something out of kilter, and the late-afternoon air carried the scent of burning upon it. I turned to the water, for the smell was coming off the sea, as though a distant ship were aflame. I looked for its glow upon the horizon, but there was only the rhythmic pulse of the lighthouse, the movement of a ferry upon the bay, and the lit rooms in the houses on the islands beyond. Everything spoke of calm and routine, and yet I could not shake my sense of unease as I made my way home.

  II

  Shape without form, shade without colour

  Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

  Those who have crossed

  With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

  Remember us—if at all—not as lost

  Violent souls, but only

  As the hollow men . . .

  T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

  5

  Merrick had promised us two days of peace, but I wasn’t prepared to gamble the safety of Rebecca and her daughter on the word of a man like that. I had seen his kind before: Merrick was a simmerer, his temper always on the verge of boiling over. I recalled the way he had reacted to my comment about the girl in the picture, and the warnings about his “personal” business. Despite his assurances, there was always the chance that he might go to a bar, down a couple of drinks, and decide now was the time to have another word with Daniel Clay’s daughter. On the other hand, I couldn’t spend all my time watching her. I needed to call in some help. I had few options. There was Jackie Garner, who was big and strong and well-meaning, but also had a couple of screws loose. In addition, where Jackie went two meat wagons on legs called the Fulci brothers usually followed, and the Fulcis were to subtlety what an egg beater was to an egg. I wasn’t sure how Rebecca Clay would take it if she found them standing on her doorstep. In fact, I wasn’t sure how the doorstep would take it either.

  Louis and Angel would be preferable, but they were over on the West Coast for a couple of days, wine tasting in the Napa Valley. Clearly, I had sophisticated friends, but I couldn’t afford to leave Rebecca unprotected until they returned. It seemed that I had no other choice.

  Reluctantly, I called Jackie Garner.

  I met him at Sangillo’s Tavern, a little place on Hampshire that was always lit up like Christmas inside. He was drinking a Bud Light, but I tried not to hold that against him. I joined him at the bar and ordered a sugar-free Sprite. Nobody laughed, which was kind of them.

  “You on a diet?” asked Jackie. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that bore the logo of a Portland bar that had closed down so long ago its patrons had probably paid for their drinks in wampum. His hair was shaved close to his skull and there was a faded bruise beside his left eye. His belly pressed tightly against the shirt so that a casual observer might have dismissed him as another fat guy at a bar, but Jackie Garner wasn’t that at all. In all the time that I’d known him no one had ever knocked him down, and I didn’t like to think about what had happened to whomever had left that bruise on Jackie’s face.

  “I’m not in the mood for beer,” I said.

  He raised his bottle, squinted at me, and announced, in a deep baritone: “This isn’t beer. This is Bud.”
r />   He looked pleased with himself.

  “That’s very catchy,” I said.

  He smiled widely. “I’ve been entering competitions. You know, the ones where you think up a slogan. Like, ‘This isn’t beer. This is Bud’.” He picked up my Sprite. “Or, ‘This isn’t soda. This is Sprite.’ ‘These aren’t nuts. These are—’ Well, these are nuts, but you get the point.”

  “I see a pattern emerging.”

  “I figure it’s adaptable to any product.”

  “Except nuts in bowls.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Don’t see how it can fail. You busy these days?”

  Jackie shrugged. As far as I could tell, he was never busy. He lived with his mother, did a little bar work a couple of days a week, and spent the rest of the time manufacturing homemade munitions in a tumbledown shack in the woods behind his house. Occasionally, someone would report hearing an explosion to the local cops. Even less occasionally, the cops would send a car along in the faint hope that Jackie had blown himself up. So far, they had been sorely disappointed.

  “You need something done?” he asked. His eyes gleamed with new light at the prospect of potential mayhem.

  “Just for a couple of days. There’s a woman who’s being bothered by a guy.”

  “You want us to hurt him?”

  “Us? Who’s us?”

  “You know.” He gestured with his thumb at some indefinable place beyond the confines of the bar. Despite the cold, I felt a prickle of sweat on my forehead and aged about one year in an instant.

  “They’re here? What are you, joined at the hip?”

  “I told them to wait outside. I know they make you nervous.”

  “They don’t make me nervous. They scare the hell out of me.”

  “Well, they’re not allowed in here no more anyway. They’re not allowed anywhere, I guess, not since the, uh, the thing.”

  There was a “thing.” Where the Fulcis were concerned, there was always a “thing”.

  “What thing?”

  “The thing over at the B-Line.”

  The B-Line was just about the roughest joint in the city, a dive bar that offered a free drink to anyone who could produce a one-month AA badge. Getting banned from the B-Line for causing trouble was like getting thrown out of the Eagle Scouts for being too good with knots.

  “What happened?”

  “They hit a guy with a door.”

  By comparison with some of the stories I had heard about the Fulcis, and the B-Line, that seemed comparatively minor.

  “You know, that doesn’t sound so bad. For them.”

  “Well, it was really a couple of guys. And two doors. And they took the doors off their hinges so they could hit the guys with them. Now they can’t go out so much no more. They were kind of sore about it. Still are. But they don’t mind sitting in the lot here. They think the lights are pretty, and I bought them a couple of family-style takeouts from Norm’s.”

  I took a deep, calming breath.

  “I don’t want anybody hurt, which means, I’m not sure that I want the Fulcis near this.”

  Jackie scowled. “They’ll be disappointed. I told them I was meeting you and they asked to come along. They like you.”

  “How can you tell? Because they haven’t hit me with a door yet?”

  “They don’t mean no harm. It’s just that the doctors keep changing their medication and sometimes it don’t take like it should.”

  Jackie spun his bottle sorrowfully. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and it was clear that he felt society had misjudged the Fulcis on a great many levels. Society, by contrast, was certain that it had the Fulcis down pat, and had taken all appropriate steps to ensure that contact with them was kept to a minimum.

  I patted Jackie on the arm.

  “We’ll find something for them to do, okay?”

  He brightened. “They’re good guys to have around when things get messy,” he said, conveniently ignoring the fact that things tended to get messy precisely because they were around.

  “Look, Jackie, this guy’s name is Merrick, and he’s been following my client for a week now. He’s been asking about her father, but her father has been missing for a long time, so long that he’s been declared legally dead. I cornered Merrick yesterday and he said that he’d ease off for a couple of days, but I’m not inclined to trust him. He’s got a temper.”

  “Was he carrying?”

  “I didn’t see one, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Jackie sipped his beer.

  “How come he’s only showing up now?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “If this guy’s been missing so long, how come this other guy is only asking about him now?”

  I looked at Jackie. That was the thing about him. Something definitely rattled in his head when he walked, but he wasn’t dumb. I’d considered the question of why Merrick was asking about Daniel Clay now, but not what might have prevented him from doing so before. I thought of the tattoo on his knuckle. Could Merrick have been doing time since Clay disappeared?

  “Maybe I can find that out while you’re watching the woman. Her name is Rebecca Clay. I’ll introduce you to her tonight. And look: keep the Fulcis away from face-to-faces with her, but if you want to have them close by, then that’s okay with me. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to let them be seen keeping an eye on the house.”

  Even a man like Merrick was likely to be discouraged from approaching Rebecca by the sight of three big men, two of whom made the third look undernourished.

  I gave Jackie a description of Merrick and his car, including the tag number.

  “Don’t bank on the car, though. He may ditch it now that it’s been connected with him.”

  “Century and a half a day,” said Jackie. “I’ll look after Tony and Paulie out of it.” He finished his beer. “Now, you gotta come out and say hello. They’ll be offended if you don’t.”

  “And we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I meant it, too.

  “Damn straight.”

  Tony and Paulie hadn’t arrived in their monster truck, which was why I hadn’t spotted them when I’d parked. Instead they were sitting in the front of a dirty white van that Jackie sometimes used for what he euphemistically termed his “business.” As I approached, the Fulcis opened the van doors and climbed out. I wasn’t even sure how Jackie had managed to get them in there to begin with. It looked like the van had been assembled around them. The Fulcis weren’t tall, but they were wide, even double-wide. The kind of places in which they shopped for clothes opted for practical over fashionable, so they were twin visions in polyester and cheap leather. Tony clasped my hand in one of his paws, smearing it with barbecue sauce, and I felt something pop. Paulie patted me softly on the back and I almost coughed up a lung.

  “We’re back in business, fellas,” announced Jackie proudly.

  And for a brief moment, before common sense prevailed, I felt strangely happy.

  I drove with Jackie over to Rebecca Clay’s house. She looked relieved to see me again. I made the introductions and told Rebecca that Jackie would be looking after her for the next few days, but that I’d also be around if anything came up. I think Jackie looked more like her idea of a bodyguard than I did, so she didn’t object. In the interests of almost full disclosure, I also told her that there would be two other men nearby in case of trouble, and gave her a rough description of the Fulcis that erred on the side of flattery without resorting to outright lies.

  “Are three men really necessary?” she asked.

  “No, but they come as a package. They’ll cost one-fifty a day, which is cheap, but if you’re worried about the cost we can work something out.”

  “It’s okay. I think I can afford it for a while.”

  “Good. I’m going to try to find out more about Merrick while we have breathing space, and I’m going to talk to some of the people on your list. If we’re no closer to figuring out Merrick at the end of this two-day grace perio
d, and he still won’t accept that you can’t help him, we’ll go to the cops again and try to have him picked up before running the whole thing by a judge. Right now, I know you’d prefer a more physical approach, but we need to exhaust the other possibilities first.”

  “I understand.”

  I asked after her daughter, and she told me that she’d arranged for Jenna to go to D.C. with her grandparents for a week. Her absence had been cleared with the school, and Jenna would leave first thing in the morning.

  She walked me to the door, and touched my arm.

  “Do you know why I hired you?” she asked. “I used to date a guy called Neil Chambers. He was Jenna’s father.”

  Neil Chambers. His father, Ellis, had approached me earlier in the year, seeking help for his son. Neil owed money to some men in Kansas City, and there was no way that he could pay the debt. Ellis wanted me to act as an intermediary, to find some way to solve the problem. I couldn’t help him, not then. I had suggested some people I thought might be able to work something out, but it was too late for Neil. His body was dumped in a ditch as a warning to others shortly after Ellis and I had spoken.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be. Neil didn’t see Jenna much, hadn’t seen her in years, to tell the truth, but I’m still close to Ellis. He and his wife, Sara, are the ones who are looking after Jenna this week, and he was the one who told me about you.”

  “I turned him down. I couldn’t give him help when he asked for it.”

  “He understood. He didn’t blame you. He still doesn’t. Neil was lost to him. Ellis knew that, but he loved him nevertheless. When I told Ellis about Merrick, he said that I should talk to you. He’s not the kind of man to bear a grudge.”

  She released her hold on my arm. “Do you think they’ll ever get the men who killed Neil?” she asked.

  “Man,” I said. “It was one man who was responsible. His name was Donnie P.”

  “Will anything ever be done about it?”

  “Something was done,” I said.