The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  So now Willie and Arno were back in the place that they loved, the radio tuned, as it always was, to WCBS at 101.1. The station was on a fifties jag that night: Bobby Darin, Tennessee Ernie Ford, even Alvin and the Chipmunks – and here Willie, usually a man of some tolerance, was tempted to take a hammer to the speakers, especially when Arno, who could be an irritatingly uncanny mimic when he chose, began to sing along from under the hood of a ’98 Dodge Durango with a busted radiator hose and twin white stripes down the body that appeared to have been painted by someone cross-eyed.

  It was after ten, and yet they were still working, neither man troubled by the lateness of the hour. Familiar smells, familiar sounds. This was home to them. They were fixing things, and content to be doing so.

  Well, reasonably content.

  ‘For the love of sweet Jesus and His holy divine mother,’ said Willie, ‘cut that out!’

  ‘Cut what out?’

  ‘The singing.’

  ‘Was I singing?’

  ‘Dammit, you know you were singing, if you can call it that. If you’re gonna sing along to something, sing along to the Elegants or the Champs. You don’t even do a bad Kitty Kalen, but not, not Alvin and the goddamned Chipmunks.’

  ‘David Seville,’ said Arno.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That was the Alvin and the Chipmunks guy. David Seville. It was 1958 when he started, except he wasn’t really David Seville, he was Ross Bagdasarian. Armenian, from Fresno.’

  ‘There’s a Fresno in Armenia?’

  ‘What? No, there’s no Fresno in Armenia.’ Arno paused. ‘Not that I know of. No, he was of Armenian descent. His people just ended up in Fresno. Jeez, why is it so hard to talk to you? It’s like dealing with a geriatric.’

  ‘Yeah, well maybe it’s because you don’t know anything useful. How come you don’t know anything useful anyway? You got all this stuff in your head – poetry, monster movies, even damned chipmunks – and you still can’t find your way around a Dodge transmission without a map and a bag of supplies.’

  ‘If I’m so bad, how come you ain’t fired me yet?’

  ‘I have fired you. Three times.’

  ‘Yeah, well, how come you let me back again?’

  ‘You work cheap. You’re lousy at what you do, but at least you don’t cost much to keep.’

  ‘Bad food,’ said Arno.

  ‘And such small portions,’ said Willie, and the two men laughed. The sound was still echoing in the farthest corners of the auto shop when Willie tapped lightly but audibly three times on the side of his workbench, a signal that they had agreed upon as a warning of potential trouble. From the corner of his eye, Willie saw Arno reach for a baseball bat that he had begun to keep close to hand as of that day, but otherwise the little man did not move. Willie shifted his right hand to the front pocket of his capacious overalls, where it gripped a compact Browning .380 that had come from Louis.

  Then Arno heard it: two knocks on the door. The auto shop was locked down. Now there was someone outside in the dark, demanding to be let in.

  ‘Shit,’ said Arno.

  Willie stood. He held the Browning down by his side as he walked to the door and risked a glance through the inter ior grill and the Plexiglas of the window, trying not to make his head a target, then hit the exterior light.

  The man standing outside was alone, and his hands were buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat. Willie couldn’t tell for sure if he was armed. If he was, he wasn’t waving it around.

  ‘Are you Willie Brew?’ the man asked.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Willie. He had never been much for the ‘who’s asking’ school of greeting and debate.

  ‘I have a message for Louis.’

  ‘I don’t know a Louis.’

  The man drew closer to the glass so that he could be certain that Willie would hear what he had to say, then continued as though Willie had never spoken.

  ‘It comes from his guardian angel. Tell him to drop the job and come home, him and his friend. Tell them both to walk away. He asks, you’re to say that Hoyle and Leehagen are intimately acquainted. Are you clear on that?’

  And something told Willie that this man was, however confusingly, trying to do Louis a good turn, and to deny any further knowledge of him would not only be fruitless, but might also result in harm to the two men who were, after Arno, closest to Willie.

  ‘If this message is so important, you ought to tell him yourself,’ said Willie.

  ‘He’s out of contact,’ he said. ‘Where he is, cells don’t work. If he calls you, pass the message on to him.’

  ‘He won’t call here,’ said Willie. ‘That’s not how he operates.’

  ‘Then he’s not coming back,’ said the man.

  He turned to walk away. After a second’s hesitation, Willie opened the door and followed him into the night, slipping the gun into the pocket of his overalls. The visitor was approaching the rear passenger side door of a black Lincoln town car that had been parked out of Willie’s line of sight. As Willie appeared, the driver’s door opened and a man emerged. He didn’t look like any chauffeur that Willie had ever seen. He was young, and neatly dressed in a gray suit, but he had eyes so dead they properly belonged in a jar somewhere. His right hand was hidden behind the door, but Willie knew instinctively that there was a gun in it. He gave silent thanks that he had not walked out of the garage with the little Browning visible. Instead, he held his hands away from his body, as though preparing to hug the man that he was following.

  ‘Hey,’ said Willie.

  The man stopped, his hand on the handle of the car door.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Willie.

  ‘My name is Milton. Louis will know who I am.’

  ‘That’s no good to me. He’s gone. They’re both gone. Can’t you do something? Can’t you help them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not even sure where they are,’ said Willie, and he heard the hint of pleading in his voice, of desperation, and felt no shame. Angel had told him a little, but it had meant nothing to him. He was surprised that Angel had chosen to share any details at all with him, but he had been more concerned about returning to his beloved auto shop at the time. All he had was the name of a town upstate. What the hell use was that if they were in trouble? He wasn’t a one-man army. He was just an overweight guy in overalls, with a gun that he didn’t want to use.

  But Louis and Angel were important to him. Whatever his fears and reservations, they had saved him, in their way. Willie was under no illusions: when Louis had first approached him, it was not out of altruism. It had suited him to have Willie in the building that he had acquired, for reasons that Willie himself still did not quite understand. Yet, self-interested or not, Louis had permitted Willie to keep doing what he loved. That was a long time ago, and things were different now. They had paid for his birthday party. They had even given him a gift: a Rolex Submariner Oyster, discreetly handed to him after everyone was gone from Nate’s that night. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen that did not have four wheels. Never had he even imagined that he would own something so lovely. He was wearing it now. Only for an instant had he conside red putting it in a drawer and saving it for special wear. He didn’t do ‘special.’ If he put it in a drawer, then it would stay there until he died. Better to wear it, and enjoy the fact of it upon his wrist.

  He owed these men. He would do whatever he had to in order to help them, even if it meant getting down on his knees in the middle of the street before a stranger and his armed acolyte.

  And the visitor relented, if only slightly.

  ‘They’re hunting a man named Arthur Leehagen. He lives upstate in the northern Adirondacks, not far from Massena. Now that you know where they are, what are you going to do about it?’

  He opened the door and got into the car, pulling the door closed after him without another word to Willie. All the time, the man with the dead, unblinking eyes kept watch. Only when the rear door was closed, a
nd his charge was safe, did he get into the front seat and drive away.

  18

  Once again, the auto shop was locked down. The radio had been silenced, and the lights around the two vehicles upon which Willie and Arno had been working were now extinguished, the cars standing raised in the gloom on their hydraulic lifts like forgotten patients on a pair of operating tables, abandoned by the surgeon for more deserving cases.

  Willie and Arno were in the small office at the rear of the premises, surrounded by invoices and scribbled notes and oil-stained boxes. There was only one chair, which Willie was occupying. Arno squatted on the floor, small and thin, his head slightly too large for his body, a gargoyle evicted from its pedestal. Each had a cup in his hand, and a bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the desk between them. If ever there was a time for hard liquor, Willie supposed that this was it.

  ‘Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds,’ said Arno. ‘They’ve been in trouble before, and they came out of it okay.’

  He didn’t sound as though he entirely believed his own words, even if he desperately wanted to.

  Willie took a sip of booze. It tasted terrible. He wasn’t sure why he even kept it in his filing cabinet. It had been a gift from a grateful customer, although not one grateful enough to give a better bottle as a token of appreciation. Willie had been meaning to give it away for, oh, at least two years now, but he kept holding off just in case it came in useful for something. Tonight, it just had.

  ‘After all, it’s not like we can call the cops,’ said Arno.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, what would we tell them?’ Arno’s brow briefly furrowed in concentration, as though he were already trying to construct in his mind a plausible yet entirely fictitious explanation for some imaginary law enforcement officer.

  ‘And it’s not as if we can go up there and help them either. You can use a gun, but I never held one in my life until last week, and that didn’t go so good. I nearly killed you with it.’

  Willie nodded glumly.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Arno continued. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to help them, up to a point, but I fix cars for a living. For what we’re talking about here, that’s not going to be too much use to anyone.’

  Willie put his mug aside. ‘I hate this stuff,’ he said wearily, and Arno wasn’t sure if he was talking about the booze or something else. Willie rested his elbows on his desk, cupped his hands before him, and buried his face in them, his eyes closed, his fingertips almost touching across the bridge of his nose.

  Arno watched his boss with an expression of tenderness on his face. It would be true to say that Arno loved Willie Brew. He loved him completely and devotedly, although had he ever chosen to say so out loud Willie would have had him committed. Willie had given him a place in which to work that was as much a sanctuary as Arno’s cluttered, paper-filled apartment. He respected Arno’s skills, even if he was scrupulously careful never to demonstrate that respect through either word or deed. He was Arno’s closest friend, the one to whom Arno had turned when his beloved mother died, the man who had helped him carry her casket, walking alongside him with two anonymous undertakers behind. He was the finest mechanic Arno had ever met, and the most decent of men. Arno would have done anything for Willie Brew. He would even have died for him.

  But he would not die for Louis and Angel. He liked Angel, who was at least friendly at times in a vaguely human, non-disturbing way. Louis, though, he did not like. Louis scared him to hell and back. He knew that this was a man whom he should respect, someone of power and lethality, but Arno respected Willie more. Willie had earned his respect through his actions, through his humanity. Louis required respect in the way a panther did, because only an idiot wouldn’t respect something so potentially dangerous, but that didn’t mean you wanted to spend any more time in the panther’s cage than was absolutely necessary.

  He recalled how Willie had spoken to him the morning after that first meeting with Louis. Willie had bought coffee and doughnuts, and the smell of them had been wafting from the office when Arno arrived for what he fully expected to be his last day in the auto shop. Willie had told him of Louis and his offer, and of how he felt that he had no choice but to accept it. That was how he put it, Arno remembered: he would take the loan, but only reluctantly. Willie was too wise to the ways of the world to imagine that such gifts came without conditions both acknowledged and unacknowledged. At the time, Arno had just been grateful that they would be able to continue in business, and he didn’t care if the guy offering the loan had cloven hooves and horns coming out of his head. That changed once he met Louis, and saw the physical form that was about to cast a shadow over what had previously been a regular business. Angel had lightened that shadow a little, but for many years Arno and his beloved boss had still been forced to work under it, and Arno was human enough to resent that fact.

  Now Angel and Louis were in trouble, and while Arno knew that they had acted in response to what had occurred earlier, that they had no choice in the matter and their own survival, and perhaps even the related survival of Arno and Willie, was dependent upon their actions, Arno wasn’t so naive as to believe that, in the normal course of events, men with guns just arrived out of the blue to kill people because the mood struck. This was payback for something that had been done by Louis. Arno didn’t want to see Angel and Louis dead, but he could understand why someone else might want to.

  Willie stood and began rummaging through the papers on the desk. Eventually, after a box of nuts and assorted unpaid bills had tumbled to the floor, he found what he was looking for: his battered black address book. He thumbed through the pages, stopping at ‘N - P’.

  ‘Who you gonna call?’ asked Arno, and then added, in a misplaced attempt at humor: ‘Ghostbusters?’

  A strange smile appeared on Willie Brew’s lips. It made Arno even more nervous than he was already.

  ‘In a way,’ said Willie.

  Arno saw him pick up a pen and begin writing down a number: first a 1, followed by 2–0–7, and Arno then knew to whom they were turning for help. He poured himself another shot of Maker’s Mark and added a little more to Willie’s cup.

  ‘For luck,’ he said.

  After all, he figured, if the Detective was involved then someone was going to need it. He just hoped it wouldn’t be Willie and him.

  Willie went down the block to Nate’s to make the call. He was concerned that the feds might be tapping the line in the auto shop. He had even been worried for a time that they might have planted a bug in his office, but despite the filth and the general clutter of his workplace Willie knew every inch of it intimately, and the slightest change in his environment would have been immediately apparent to him. The phone was another matter. He knew from watching HBO that they no longer needed to stick little devices in the receiver. This wasn’t the Cold War. They could probably tell what you had for lunch just by pointing a gizmo at your belly. Willie was particularly cautious about cell phones, ever since Louis had informed him of just how easily they could be tracked and their communications intercepted. Louis had explained to him how a cell phone acts like a little electronic beacon, even when powered off, so that its owner’s position could be pinpointed at any time. The only way to render yourself invisible was to take out the battery. That bothered Willie more than anything else, the idea that his every move might be tracked by unseen watchers in a bunker somewhere. Willie wasn’t about to head off to Montana and live in a compound with guys who watched Triumph of the Will to get off, but equally he didn’t see any point in making things easier for the government than they already were. It wasn’t like Willie was a spy, it was just that he didn’t much care for the idea of people eavesdropping on anything he might have to say, however inconsequential it might be, or monitoring his movements, and his involvement with Louis had made him realize that he could become, however tangentially, a target for any investigation that might focus on his business partner, so it paid to be careful.

  Nate
raised a hand in greeting to Willie when he entered the bar, but Willie merely grimaced in response.

  ‘What can I get you?’ asked Nate.

  ‘I need to use your phone,’ said Willie. There was a crowd of loud young women at the back of the bar, where the public phone stood close to the men’s room, and there was something in Willie’s voice and expression that told Nate this wasn’t the kind of call you wanted someone to overhear.

  ‘Go in back,’ said Nate. ‘Use my office. Close the door.’

  Willie thanked him and slipped under the bar. He took a seat at Nate’s desk, a desk that, in its general neatness and sense of order, bore no resemblance to his own. Nate’s phone was an old rotary dial model, adapted for the modern age but still requiring the judicious application of a forefinger to make a call. The one time Willie was in a hurry, and trust Nate to have a phone that Edison could have built.

  First of all, Willie called the answering service and left a message for Angel and Louis, repeating verbatim what the man named Milton had told him to say, in the faint hope that one of them might pick it up before all of this went any farther. Next he called Maine. The Detective wasn’t home, so Willie decided to try the bar in Portland where he was now working. It took him a while to remember the name. Something Lost. The Lost Something. The Great Lost Bear, that was it. He got the number from 411, and the phone was answered by a woman. He could hear music playing in the background, but he couldn’t identify it. After a couple of minutes, the Detective came on the line.