The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  In the waiting area outside, across from the main desk, a black woman was sitting, clutching her handbag. She was the boy’s grandmother, but she could have been his mother, her face was so youthful. Ever since the boy’s arrest, one or another of the women in the boy’s family had kept silent vigil on the same cold, hard chair. They all had a dignified air about them, a sense that they were almost doing the room a service by sitting in it. This one, though, the eldest of them, made Wooster uneasy. There were stories told about her. People went to her to have their fortunes read, to find out the sex of their unborn infant, or to have their minds put at rest about missing relatives or the souls of dead children. Wooster didn’t believe in any of that stuff, but he still treated the woman with respect. She didn’t demand it. She didn’t have to. Only a fool would fail to recognize that it was her due.

  Seeing her there now, waiting patiently, certain in the know ledge that the boy would soon be released into her charge, Wooster could spot the similarities between the woman and her grandson. It wasn’t merely physical, although both carried themselves with the same slim grace. No, something of her own disconcerting calm had transferred itself to him. For some reason, Wooster thought of dark, still waters, of sinking into their depths, going deeper and deeper, down, down until suddenly pink jaws opened amid pale luminescence and the nature of the thing itself, the creature that hid in those unknown reaches, was finally and fatally revealed.

  Wooster figured his day couldn’t get a whole lot worse, although as far as he was concerned this business wasn’t done with, no sir, not by a long shot. The boy could go home to his aunts and his grandmother and whoever else shared their little coven in the woods, but Wooster would be watching him. Wherever that boy walked, Wooster would be stepping on his shadow. He’d break that boy yet.

  And there was still the fag card left to play. Wooster had his suspicions about the boy. He’d heard stories. The only women with whom Louis spent time were those in his own household, and over at the Negro school he’d had to fight his corner a couple of times. Wooster knew that kids were often wrong about these things: any sign of sensitivity, of weakness, of femininity in a man and they would be on it like flies to a cut. Most of the time they were wrong, but sometimes they got it right. There were sodomy laws in this state, and Wooster had no difficulty in enforcing them. If he could get the kid on a sodomy beef, then that could be used as leverage on the Deber killing. Spending time in the pen on a queer charge was pretty much a guarantee of pain and misery right there. Better to go in with a reputation for having taken another man’s life. At least that bought some respect. Wooster wasn’t even interested in seeing the boy go to the chair. It would be enough for him to have proven others wrong: the state cops, his own people who had laughed at him behind his back for believing that a Negro boy could have committed a crime of such sophistication. Wooster wondered if he could bait a hook for the boy. There were one or two men in the town who wouldn’t be above offering themselves up for the chance of a little dark meat. All it would take would be an agreed location, a specific time, and Wooster’s fortuitous arrival on the scene. The older man would be allowed to walk, but the boy would not. It was a possibility.

  As things happened, though, Wooster’s day was about to worsen considerably, despite his own convictions to the contrary, and any plans for entrapment would soon turn to dust.

  ‘Chief?’ It was Seth Kavanagh, the youngest of his men. Irish Catholic. Mick through and through. There had been issues with some of the people in the town when Wooster hired him, and he’d even had a friendly visit from Little Tom Rudge and a couple of his fellow pillow-case-wearers, suggesting that he might want to reconsider hiring Kavanagh given that this was a Baptist town. Wooster listened to their pitch, then gave them the bum’s rush. Little Tom and his kind made Wooster’s skin crawl, but more than that, he felt incipient guilt whenver they came his way. He knew about the things that they had done. He knew about Negroes being beaten for still being within the town limits at sundown, even if those town limits seemed to change according to how much the local crackers had drunk at the time. He knew about unexplained fires in Negro cabins, and rapes that were brushed away as a little fun that had gotten out of hand.

  And he knew about Errol Rich, and what had been done to him in front of a great many of the very people who praised God alongside Wooster in church every Sunday. Oh yes, Wooster knew all about that, and he had enough self-knowledge to recognize his complicity in that act, even if he had been nowhere near the old tree from which Errol had been hanged and burned. Wooster hadn’t cemented his grip on the town, not at that point, and by the time he heard about what was happening it was too late to do anything to stop it, or so he told himself. He’d made it clear, though, in the aftermath, that such an act was never to take place again, not in this town, not if he had any say in the matter. It was murder, and Wooster wouldn’t condone it. It also got the Negroes all steamed up for no good cause. It overstepped the mark to the point where their anger threatened to overcome their fear. Furthermore – and it was this point, more than any other, that got shitbags like Little Tom thinking – it had the potential to bring the feds down on their heads, and they weren’t understanding of the way things were done in small towns like this one. They didn’t understand, and they didn’t care. They were looking to make an example of people who didn’t appreciate that the times they were a-changin’, as that folk singer fella liked to put it.

  And that was another reason for making sure that the boy Louis was punished for what he had done to Deber. If he got away with murder this time, then what would follow? Maybe he might take it into his head to move on to the men who had killed Errol Rich, the ones who had driven the car out from underneath his feet so that he kicked at dead summer air; the ones who had doused him in gasoline; the ones who had lit the torch and applied it to his clothes, turning him into a beacon in the night. Because there were whispers about Errol Rich and the boy’s mother too, and you could be certain that the boy had heard them. A man’s father dies like that, and it could be that he would take it upon himself to avenge him. Damn, Wooster knew that he would, in the same situation.

  Now here was Kavanagh, another of Wooster’s little experi ments in social change, bothering him with shit that he was certain he could do without. Wooster wiped his face with his handkerchief, then wrung it dry into his trash basket.

  ‘What is it?’

  He didn’t look up. Once again, his gaze was fixed upon the wall before him, as though boring through it and the observation room beyond to reach the boy who had defied him for so long.

  ‘Company.’

  Wooster turned in his chair. Through the window behind him, he watched the men emerge from their cars. One was a standard issue Ford. He smelled government, a suspicion confirmed when Ray Vallance rolled down the passenger side window and tossed a cigarette butt on the chief’s yard. Vallance was the ASAC of the local FBI field office. He was an okay guy, as far as the feds went. He wasn’t trying to move folks faster than they could walk on this civil rights thing, but he wouldn’t let them dawdle either. Still, Wooster would have words with him about that butt. It showed disrespect.

  The second car was too good to have come from any government pool. It was tan, with matching leather up holstery, and the man who got out on the driver’s side looked more like a chauffeur than an agent, although Wooster thought that he also seemed like one mean sonofabitch, and he was pretty certain that the bulge underneath his left arm didn’t come from a tumor. He opened the right rear passenger door, and a third man joined them. He looked old, but Wooster guessed that he wasn’t much older than he himself was. He was just the kind of man who had always looked old. He reminded the chief of that old English actor, Wilfrid-Something-Something, guy was in the movie of My Fair Lady that had come out a few years back. Wooster had seen it with his wife. It had been better than he was expecting, he seemed to recall. Well, that guy, the Wilfrid guy, he had always looked old too, even when he was you
ng. Now here was one of his near relatives, up close and in the flesh.

  Vallance seemed to sigh in his seat, then got out of the car and led two of his fellow agents to the door of the chief’s office, bypassing the cop at the desk to enter the main area.

  ‘Chief Wooster,’ he said, nodding with a pretense of amiability.

  ‘Special Agent Vallance,’ said Wooster. He didn’t stand. Vallance had never addressed him by anything but his first name before, and Wooster had returned the familiarity, even when there was business at hand. Vallance was giving him the nod, letting him know that this was serious, that both he and Wooster were being watched. Still, Wooster wasn’t about to stand down on his own turf without a fight, and there was the matter of that butt to consider.

  Wooster looked past Vallance to where the other four men stood, the old-looking guy in the middle of the pack, smaller than the others.

  ‘What you got here, a wedding party?’ asked Wooster.

  ‘Can we talk inside?’

  ‘Sure.’ Wooster rose and spread his hands expansively. ‘Everybody’s welcome here.’

  Only Vallance and the older man entered, the latter closing the door behind them. Wooster could feel the eyes of his men and his secretary on him, boring through the glass. Knowing that he was on show before his own people made him step up to the plate. He straightened his shoulders and stood taller, his back to the window, not bothering to adjust the blinds, so that they had the sun in their eyes.

  ‘What’s the deal, Agent Vallance?’

  ‘The deal is that boy you’re sweating back there.’

  ‘Everybody sweats here.’

  ‘Not like him.’

  ‘Boy is a suspect in a murder investigation.’

  ‘So I hear. What have you got on him?’

  ‘Got probable cause. Man he killed may have murdered his mother.’

  ‘May have?’

  ‘He ain’t around to ask no more.’

  ‘From what I hear, he was asked before he left this world. He didn’t ’fess up to anything.’

  ‘He did it, though. Anyone believes he didn’t is ready to meet Santa Claus.’

  ‘So, probable cause. That all you got?’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘The boy bending?’

  ‘The boy’s not the kind to bend. But he’ll break, in the end.’

  ‘You seem real sure of that.’

  ‘He’s a boy, not a man, and I’ve broken better men than he’ll ever be. You want to tell me what this is about? I don’t think you have jurisdiction here, Ray.’ Wooster had given up being polite. ‘This isn’t a federal beef.’

  ‘We think it is.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘Dead man was a crew chief on the new road by the Orismachee Swamp. That’s a federal reserve.’

  ‘Will be a federal reserve,’ Wooster corrected him. ‘It’s still just swamp now.’

  ‘Nope, that swamp, and the road that’s being built, have just come under federal jurisdiction. Declaration was made yesterday. Rushed through. I got the paperwork here.’

  He reached into his inside jacket pocket, produced a sheaf of typed documents, and handed them to Wooster. The chief found his glasses, perched them on his nose, and read the small print.

  ‘So’, he said, when he was done, ‘that don’t change a thing. Crime was committed before this declaration was made. It’s still my jurisdiction.’

  ‘We can agree to differ on that one, Chief, but it doesn’t matter anyhow. Read closer. It’s a retrospective declaration, back to the first of the month, just before road construction began. It’s a budgetary thing, they tell me. You know how the government works.’

  Wooster examined the paper again. He found the dates in question. His brow furrowed, and then blood soared to his cheeks and forehead as his anger grew.

  ‘This is bullshit. The hell should this bother you anyway? It’s colored on colored. It’s not a rights issue. There’s no glory for you here.’

  ‘This is now a federal matter, Chief. We’re not pressing charges. You’ve got to cut the boy loose.’

  Wooster knew that the case was slipping away from him, and with it some of his authority and his standing with his own staff. He would never be able to recover it. Vallance had made him his bitch, and the boy in that cell was going to skate, and laugh at Wooster while he was doing it.

  And Wilfrid back there, with his prematurely graying hair and his neat, if slightly threadbare, clothes, had something to do with it, of that Wooster was sure.

  ‘And where do you fit into all this?’ he asked, now directing the full force of his ire at his second visitor.

  ‘I apologize,’ said the little man. He stepped forward and stretched out a perfectly manicured hand. ‘My name is Gabriel.’

  Wooster didn’t move to shake the hand that had been offered to him. He simply left it to hang in the air until Gabriel allowed it to fall. Screw you, he thought. Screw you, and Vallance, and good manners. Screw you all.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ said Wooster.

  ‘I’m here as a guest of Special Agent Vallance.’

  ‘You work for the government.’

  ‘I supply services to the government, yes.’

  That wasn’t the same thing, and Wooster knew it. He was smart enough to grasp the underlying meaning of what had just been said. Suddenly, he got the sense that he was very much out of his depth, and that however angry he was, it would be unwise to ask any more questions of Gabriel. He had been trussed up like a hog ready for the spit. All that remained was for someone to shove a spike in his ass and all the way up through his mouth, and Wooster intended to avoid that fate at all costs, even if it meant giving up the boy.

  He sat down in his office chair and opened a file. He didn’t notice what it was, and he didn’t read what was written on its pages.

  ‘Take him,’ he said. ‘He’s all yours.’

  ‘Thank you, Chief,’ said Gabriel. ‘Once again, my apologies for any inconvenience caused.’

  Wooster didn’t look up. He heard them leave his office, and the door close softly behind them.

  Chief Wooster. The big fish. Well, he’d just been shown the reality of his situation. He was a little fish in a small pond who’d somehow drifted into deep waters, and a shark had flashed its teeth at him.

  He stared at the closed office door, visualizing again the wall beyond, the observation room behind it, and the boy in his cell, except now it was Gabriel watching him, not Wooster. Sharks. Deep waters. Unknown things coiling and uncoiling in their depths. Gabriel watching the boy, the boy watching Gabriel, until the two blended together to become a single organism that lost itself in a blood-dark sea.

  5

  Willie Brew’s head hurt.

  Things hadn’t started out too badly. He’d woken feeling dehydrated, and aware that, despite the fact he hadn’t shifted position an inch in the night, he still hadn’t slept properly. Maybe I’ll get away with it, he thought. Maybe the gods are smiling on me, just this once. But by the time he reached the auto shop his head had started to pound. He was sweaty and nauseated by noon, and he knew things would go downhill from there. He just wanted the day to come to an end so that he could go home, go back to bed, and wake up the next morning with a clear head and a deep and abiding sense of regret.

  It had been this way with him ever since he had given up hard liquor. In the good old, bad old days, he could have knocked back the guts of a bottle of even the worst rail booze and still been able to function properly the next morning. Now he rarely drank anything but beer, and then usually in moderation, because beer killed him in a way liquor never had. Except a man didn’t reach the big six-oh every day, and some form of celebration was not only in order, but expected by his friends. Now he was paying the price for seven hours of pretty consistent drinking.

  Even lunch hadn’t helped. The auto shop was located in an alley just off 75th Street between 37th and Roosevelt, close by the offices of an Indian
attorney who specialized in immigration and visas, an astute choice of business address on the attorney’s part as this area had more Indians than some parts of India. Thirty-seventh Avenue itself had Italian, Afghan, and Argentinian restaurants, among others, but once you hit 74th Street it was Indian all the way. The street had even been renamed Kalpana Chawla Way, after the Indian astronaut who had been killed in the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, and men in Sikh turbans handed out menus throughout the day to all who passed by.

  This was Willie’s patch. He had grown up here, and he hoped that he would die here. He had biked out to LaGuardia and Shea Stadium as a kid, throwing stones at the rats along the way. It had mostly been the Irish and the Jews who lived here then. Ninety-fourth Street used to be known as the Mason-Dixon line, because beyond that it was all black. Willie didn’t think he’d even seen a black face below 94th until the late sixties, although by the 1980s there were some white kids attending the mostly black school up on 98th. Funny thing was, the white kids seemed to get on pretty well with the black ones. They grew up close to them, played basketball with them, and stood alongside them when interlopers trespassed on their territory. Then, in the 1980s, things began to change, and most of the Irish left for Rockaway. The gangs came in, spreading outward from Roosevelt. Willie had stayed, and faced them down, although he’d been forced to put bars on the windows of the little apartment in which he lived not far from where the auto shop now stood. Arno, meanwhile, had always lived up on Forley Street, which was Little Mexico now, and he still didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Below 83rd it was more Colombian than Mexican, and felt like another city: guys stood on the sidewalk hawking their wares, shouting and haggling in Spanish, and the stores sold music and movies that no white person was ever going to buy. Even the movies showing at the Jackson 123 had Spanish subtitles. Through it all, Willie had survived. He’d hadn’t cut and run when times got tough, and when Louis had been forced to sell the building down by Kissena, Willie had taken the opportunity to relocate closer to home, and now he, and his business, were as much a part of the history of the place as Nate’s was. It didn’t help his hangover, though.