The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  ‘That’s me,’ he said, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘Michael Wallace. This is what I do. I write true crime books.’ He reached out a hand. ‘My friends call me Mickey.’

  ‘We’re not about to become friends, Mr. Wallace.’

  He shrugged, as if he had expected as much.

  ‘Here’s the thing of it, Mr. Parker. I’ve read a lot about you. You’re a hero. You’ve brought down some real bad people, but until now nobody has written the full history of what you’ve done. I want to write a book about you. I want to tell your story: the deaths of your wife and child, the way you hunted down the man responsible, and the way you’ve hunted down others like him since then. I already have a publisher for it, and a title. It’s going to be called The Avenging Angel. Good, don’t you think?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Anyway, the advance isn’t huge – mid five-figure sum, which still isn’t too shabby for this kind of work – but I’ll split it with you fifty-fifty in return for your cooperation. We can negotiate on the royalties. My name will be on the cover, but it will be your story, as you want to tell it.’

  ‘I don’t want to tell my story, sir. This conversation is over. The coffee is on me, but I wouldn’t advise you to linger over it.’

  I turned away, but he kept talking.

  ‘I don’t think you understand, Mr. Parker. I don’t mean to be confrontational, but I’m writing this book whether you choose to help me or not. There’s a lot that’s already public record, and I’ll find out more as the interview process goes on. I’ve already done a degree of background work, and I’ve lined up a couple of people in New York who are willing to talk. Then there’ll be folks from your old neighborhood, and from around here, who can provide insights into your life. I’m giving you the chance to shape the material, to respond to it. All I want is a few hours of your time over the next week or two. I work quickly, and I won’t intrude any more than is absolutely necessary.’

  I think he was surprised by how fast I moved, but to his credit he didn’t flinch, even when I was in his face.

  ‘You listen to me,’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t about to happen. You’re going to get up, and you’re going to walk away, and I’m never going to hear from you again. Your book dies here. Am I clear?’

  Wallace picked up his notebook and tapped it once on the bar, then slipped it back into his pocket. He put his jacket on, wrapped his scarf around his neck, then put three dollars on the bar.

  ‘For the coffee, and the tip,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave the books with you. Take a look at them. They’re better than you think they are. I’ll call again in a day or two, see if you’ve reconsidered.’

  He nodded in farewell, then left. I swept his books into the trash can under the bar. Jackie Garner, who had been listening to the whole exchange, climbed from his stool and walked around to face me.

  ‘You want me to, I can take care of this,’ he said. ‘That asshole’s probably still in the parking lot.’

  I shook my head. ‘Let him go.’

  ‘I ain’t going to talk to him,’ said Jackie. ‘And if he tries to talk to Paulie and Tony, they’ll drop his body in Casco Bay.’

  ‘Thanks, Jackie.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’

  A car engine started up in the Bear’s lot. Jackie walked to the door and watched as Wallace departed.

  ‘Blue Taurus,’ he said. ‘Mass plates. Old, though. Not a rental. Not the kind of car a big-shot writer would drive.’ He returned to the bar. ‘You think you can make him stop?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can try.’

  ‘He looks like the persistent type.’

  ‘Yeah, he does.’

  ‘Well, you remember: that offer still stands. Tony and Paulie and me, we’re good with persistence. We see it as a challenge.’

  Jackie hung around after the bar had closed, but it was clear that it wasn’t out of any concern for me. He only had eyes for the woman, whose name, he whispered to me, was Lisa Goodwin. I was tempted to tell her if she was seriously considering dating Jackie to run and never look back, but that didn’t seem fair to either of them. According to Dave, who knew a little about her from previous visits she’d paid to the Bear, she was a nice woman who had made some bad choices in the past when it came to men. By comparison with most of her former lovers, Jackie was practically Cary Grant. He was loyal, and good-hearted, and, unlike some of this woman’s exes, he would never resort to violence against her. True, he lived with his mother and had a fondness for homemade munitions, and the munitions were less volatile than his mother, but Lisa could deal with those issues if and when they arose.

  I filled a mug with the last of the coffee from the pot and went out to the back office. There I turned on the computer and found out all that I could about Michael Wallace. I visited his Web site, then read some of his newspaper stories, which came to an end after 2005, and reviews of his first two books. After an hour, I had his home address, his employment history, and details of his divorce in 2002 and a DUI that he’d incurred in 2006. I’d have to talk to Aimee Price about Wallace. I wasn’t sure what action, if any, I could legally take to prevent Wallace from writing about me, but I just knew that I didn’t want my name on the cover of a book. If Aimee couldn’t help, I’d be forced to lean on Wallace, and something told me that he wouldn’t respond well to that kind of pressure. Reporters rarely did.

  Gary entered as I was finishing up.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘Well, we’re all done out here.’

  ‘Thanks. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll lock up.’

  ‘Good night, then.’ He lingered at the door.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘If that guy comes back, the writer, what should I do?’

  ‘Poison his drink. Be careful where you dump the body, though.’

  Gary looked confused, as if uncertain whether or not I was being serious. I recognized the look. Most of the people who worked at the Bear knew something about my past, especially the locals who’d been there for a few years. Who could guess what kind of stories they’d been telling Gary when I wasn’t around?

  ‘Just let me know if you see him,’ I said. ‘Maybe you could spread the word that I’d appreciate it if nobody spoke to him about me.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Gary, brightening noticeably, then left. I heard him talking to Sergei, one of the line chefs, and then a door closed behind them and all was quiet.

  The coffee had gone cold. I poured it down a sink, printed out all that I had learned about Wallace, and went home.

  Mickey Wallace sat in his motel room out by the Maine Mall and wrote up the notes on his encounter with Parker. It was a trick he’d learned as a reporter: write everything down while it was still fresh, because even after a couple of hours the memory began to play tricks. You could fool yourself into thinking that you were remembering only the important stuff, but that wasn’t the case. You were just remembering what you hadn’t forgotten, important or not. Mickey was in the habit of recording his material in longhand in a series of notebooks, and then transferring it to his computer, but the notebooks remained the primary record, and it was to them that he always returned during the process of writing a book.

  He hadn’t been disappointed or surprised by Parker’s response to his initial overture. In fact, he regarded the man’s possible participation in the venture as something of a long shot to begin with, but it never hurt to ask. What was more surprising to him was that someone hadn’t written a book about Parker already, given all that he’d done, and the cases with which he’d been involved, but that was just one of the many strange things about Charlie Parker. Somehow, despite his history and his actions, he had managed to remain just slightly off the radar. Even in the coverage of the most high profile cases, his name usually appeared buried in the fine print somewhere. It was almost as if there was an element of collusion when it came to him, an unspoken understanding that his part should be played do
wn.

  And those were just the ones that had made it into the public arena. Wallace had already done more than a little snooping, and Parker’s name had been mentioned in connection with some business in upstate New York involving Russian mobsters, or so the story went. Mickey had managed to get a local cop in Massena to talk to him over some beers and quickly came to realize that something was being covered up in a big way, but when he tried to talk to the cop again the next day, Mickey was run out of town and warned, in no uncertain terms, never to come back. The trail had died after that, but Mickey’s curiosity had been piqued.

  He could smell blood, and blood sold books.

  13

  Emily Kindler left the little town in which she had been living for the past year shortly after the funeral for her deceased boyfriend’s parents. An open verdict was delivered as to the cause of their deaths, but it was understood in the town that they had taken their own lives, although Chief Dashut increasingly wondered why they had done so before they’d had a chance to bury their son properly. He couldn’t think of any parents who would not want to do right by their deceased child, no matter how traumatized they were by what had occurred. He questioned the verdict, both publicly and privately, and yoked the deaths of the parents to the murder of their son in both his mind and his own investigation.

  There had been no denying that Emily Kindler’s shock at their deaths was genuine. One of the local doctors had been forced to give her a sedative to calm her down, and there were concerns that she might have to be admitted to a psychiatric facility. She told the chief that she had visited the Faradays on the evening before they died, and Daniel Faraday in particular had appeared distressed, but there had been no indication that one or both of the Faradays might have been planning suicide.

  The only lead so far in the killing of Bobby Faraday had come from the state police, who had discovered that Bobby had been involved in an altercation in a bar in Mackenzie, some eight miles from town, two weeks before his death. The bar in question was a roadside gin mill popular with bikers, and it seemed that Bobby, while intoxicated, had put the moves on a girl who was peripherally involved with the Crusaders biker gang. The Crusaders’ base was in Southern California, but their reach extended as far as Oklahoma and Georgia. Words had been exchanged, and a couple of punches thrown, before Bobby was dumped in the parking lot and given a kick in the ass to send him home. He was lucky not to have been stomped, but someone at the bar who knew Bobby had intervened on his behalf, arguing that he was just a kid who didn’t know any better, a kid, what’s more, who was hurting over the end of a relationship. Common sense had prevailed; well, common sense and the fortuitous arrival of a state police cruiser just as the Crusaders were debating the wisdom of giving Bobby some serious physical pain to distract him from his emotional distress. The Crusaders were bad, but the chief didn’t see them strangling a boy just because he’d crossed them. Still, the state police detectives seemed to feel that it was worth pursuing, and were now engaged in a game of catch-up with the Crusaders, assisted by the FBI. In the meantime, Dashut had pointed out to the state police the symbol carved into the beech tree, and additional photographs had been taken, but he had heard nothing more about it.

  Emily Kindler had been home alone at the time her boyfriend was believed to have been killed, which meant that she didn’t have an alibi, but that counted for half of the town too. The gas in the Faraday house had been turned on sometime after midnight and before 2 a.m., at best reckoning. Again, most of the people in town were home in bed at that time.

  But the chief didn’t really suspect the Kindler girl of any involvement in Bobby Faraday’s death and, by extension, any suspicions that he had about how Bobby’s parents had met their end did not center on her, even though he considered the possibility of her involvement out of due diligence. When the chief had quietly mentioned Emily as a suspect to Homer Lockwood, the assistant ME, who was a resident in the town and knew both Emily and the Faradays by sight, the old man had just laughed.

  ‘She doesn’t have the strength, not to do what was done to Bobby Faraday,’ he told the chief. ‘Those aren’t arms of steel.’

  So when Emily told the chief that she planned to leave town, he could hardly blame her. He did request that she notify him when she settled down somewhere, and keep him apprised of her movements for a time, and she agreed, but he had no reason to prevent her from going. She gave the chief a cell phone number at which she could be contacted, and the address of a resort hotel in Miami where she intended to seek work as a waitress, and told him that she would be willing to return at any time if she could be of help in the investigation, but when Dashut eventually tried to contact her, the cell phone number was no longer in use, and the manager of the Miami resort told him that she had never taken up his offer of a job.

  Emily Kindler, it seemed, had vanished.

  Emily headed northeast. She wanted to smell the sea, to clear her senses. She wanted to try to shake whatever was shadowing her. It had found her in that small midwestern town, though, and it had taken the Faradays. It would find her again, she knew, but she wasn’t prepared simply to lie down in a dark corner and wait for it to happen. She set her eyes on distant places, maybe even Canada.

  Men looked at her as she sat on the Greyhound bus, watching the monotonous flat landscape gradually transform into gentle hills, snow still thick upon them. A guy in a worn leather jacket who smelled of sweat and pheromones tried to talk to her at one of the rest stops, but she turned away from him and resumed her seat behind the driver, a man in his late fifties who sensed her vulnerability but, unlike others, had no intention of exploiting it. Instead, he had taken her under his wing, and glared balefully at any male below the age of seventy who threatened to take the empty seat beside the girl. When the man in the leather jacket got back on the bus and seemed intent upon changing seats to be closer to the object of his interest, the driver told him to sit his ass back down and not to move again until they hit Boston.

  Still, the man’s attentions made Emily think of Bobby, and she felt tears well. She had not loved him, but she had liked him. He was funny and sweet and awkward, at least until he started drinking, when some of his anger and frustration at his father, the small town, even her, would bubble to the surface.

  She had never been entirely sure what she wanted in a man. Sometimes, she thought that she caught some inkling of it, a brief flash of what she sought, like a light glimpsed in the darkness. She would respond to it, and then the man would respond in turn. Sometimes, it had been too late for her to retreat, and she had suffered the consequences: verbal abuse, sometimes even physical violence, and once very nearly worse than that.

  Like some young men and women her age, she had struggled to find a sense of purpose. The path that she wanted her life to take had not yet become clear to her. She thought that she might become an artist, or a writer, for she loved books and paintings and music. In big cities, she would while away hours in museums and galleries, standing before the great canvases as though she hoped that by doing so she might be absorbed into them, becoming one with their world. When she could afford it, she would buy books. When money was not so freely available, she would go to a library, although the experience of reading a book that she could not call her own was not the same. Still, they gave her a sense of possibility so that she did not feel so adrift in the world. Others had struggled with some of the same problems and they had triumphed over them.

  She did not make it as far as the Canadian border, but stopped off at a town in New Hampshire. She could not have said why, but she had learned to trust her instincts. After a week there, she still had developed no fondness for it, but she stayed despite herself. This was not a community of art or culture. It had one tiny museum, a mishmash of history, most of it local, and art, most of that local too. Any other acquisitions felt like an afterthought, the impulse of those who did not have the funds to match their taste, or, perhaps, the taste to match their funds, in a town that felt a
museum was appropriate, even necessary, without fully understanding why. This attitude seemed to have permeated all of its strata, and she could not recall another environment in which creativity was so stifled; or, at least, she could not until she remembered the small town that she had once called home. Art and beauty had no place there either, and the house in which she had grown up was barren of all such fripperies. Even magazines had no place in it, unless one counted her father’s stash of porn.

  She had not thought of him in so long. Her mother had left when she was still a child, promising to return for her, but she never came back, and in time word came that she had died somewhere in Canada, and had been buried by her new boyfriend’s family. Emily’s father did what was necessary for her education and survival, but little more. She went to school, and always had money for books. They ate adequately, but only at home and never in restaurants. Some money was put aside in a jar for household expenses, and he gave her a little for herself, but she did not know where the rest of his money went. He did not drink to excess, and he did not take drugs. Neither did he ever lay a hand upon her in affection or anger and, as she grew older and her body matured, he was careful never to do or say anything that might be deemed inappropriate. For this she was more grateful than he would ever know. She had heard the tales told by some of the other girls in her school, stories of fathers and stepfathers, of brothers and uncles, of the new boyfriends of tired, lonely mothers. Her father was not such a man. Instead, he merely kept his distance and his conversations with her to a minimum.