The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  He went downstairs, and called the number that Epstein had given him when they first met. A woman answered sleepily, and when he asked for the rabbi, she told him that he was in bed.

  ‘He had a long night,’ she explained.

  ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I was there. Wake him. Tell him it’s Will Parker.’

  The woman clearly recognized the name. She put the phone down, and Will heard her walk away. Five minutes passed, and then he heard Epstein’s voice.

  ‘Mr. Parker. I should have told you at the hospital: it’s not good for us to stay in contact this way.’

  ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘That’s not possible. What’s done is done. We must let the dead rest.’

  ‘My wife is carrying a dead baby,’ said Will. He almost vomited the words out.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Our child is dead in the womb. They think the umbilical cord got wound around its throat somehow. It’s dead. They told her yesterday. They’re going to induce labor and remove it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Epstein.

  ‘I don’t want your pity,’ said Will. ‘I want my son.’

  Epstein was silent. ‘What you’re suggesting isn’t—’

  Will cut him off.

  ‘Don’t tell me that! You make this happen. You go to your friend, Mr. Quiet in his nice suit, and you tell him what I want. Otherwise, I swear I’ll make so much noise that your ears will bleed.’ Suddenly, the energy began to leach from his body. He wanted to crawl into bed and hold his wife, hold his wife and their dead child. ‘Look, you told me that the boy would have to be taken care of. I can take care of him. Hide him with me. Hide him in plain sight. Please.’

  Epstein sighed. ‘I will talk to our friends,’ he said at last. ‘Give me the name of the doctor who is looking after your wife.’

  Will did so. The number was in the address book beside the telephone.

  ‘Where is your wife now?’

  ‘She’s asleep upstairs. She took some pills.’

  ‘I’ll call you in one hour,’ said Epstein, and hung up.

  One hour and five minutes later, the phone rang. Will, who had been sitting on the floor beside it, picked it up before it had a chance to ring a second time.

  ‘When your wife wakes up, Mr. Parker, you must tell her the truth,’ said Epstein. ‘Ask her to forgive you, then tell her what you propose.’

  Will did not sleep that night. Instead, he mourned for Caroline Carr, and when dawn broke he put his grief for her aside and prepared for what he felt certain would be the death of his marriage.

  ‘He called me that morning,’ said Jimmy. ‘He told me what he intended to do. He was prepared to gamble everything on the possibility of holding on to the boy: his career, his marriage, the happiness, even the sanity, of his wife.’

  He was about to pour some more wine into his glass, then stopped.

  ‘I can’t drink any more,’ he said. ‘The wine looks like blood.’ He pushed the bottle and the glass away. ‘We’re nearly done anyway, for now. I’ll finish this part, and then I have to sleep. We can talk again tomorrow. If you want, you can spend the night. There’s a guest room.’

  I opened my mouth to object, but he raised his hand.

  ‘Believe me, when I’ve finished tonight, you’ll have enough to think about. You’ll be grateful that I’ve stopped.’

  He leaned forward, his hands cupped before him. They were trembling.

  ‘So your old man was waiting at your mother’s bedside when she woke . . .’

  I think, sometimes, of what my father and mother endured that day. I wonder if there was a kind of madness to his actions, spurred on by his fear that he seemed destined to lose two children, one to death and the other to an anonymous existence surrounded by those who were not related by blood to him. He must have known, as he stood above my mother, debating whether to wake her or let her sleep on, delaying the moment of confession, that it would sunder relations with her forever. He was about to inflict twin wounds upon her: the pain of his betrayal, and the perhaps greater agony of learning that he had succeeded in doing with another what she had failed to do for him. She was carrying a dead child in her womb, while her husband had, only hours before, looked upon his own son, born of a dead mother. He loved his wife, and she loved him, and he was now going to hurt her so badly that she would never fully recover.

  He did not tell anyone of what transpired between them, not even Jimmy Gallagher. All I know is that my mother left him for a time and fled to Maine, a precursor to the more permanent flight that would occur after my father’s death, and a distant echo of my own actions after my wife and child were taken from me. She was not my birth mother, and I understand now the reasons for the distance there was between us, even unto her death, but we were more similar than either of us could have imagined. She took me north after the Pearl River killings, and her father, my beloved grandfather, became a guiding force in my life, but my mother also assumed a greater role as I came of age. I think, sometimes, that only after my father died did she truly find it in her heart to forgive him, and perhaps to forgive me the circumstances of my birth. Slowly, we drew closer to each other. She taught me the names of trees and plants and birds, for this was her place, this northern state, and although I did not fully appreciate then the knowledge that she was trying to impart, I think I understood the reasons for her wanting to communicate it to me. We were both grieving, but she would not allow me to be lost to it. And so each day we would walk together for a time, regardless of the weather, and sometimes we would talk, and sometimes we would not, but it was enough that we were together, and we were alive. During those years, I became hers, and now, every time I name to myself a tree, or a flower, or a tiny creeping thing, it is a small act of remembrance for her.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Elaine Parker called her husband after a week had passed, and they spoke for an hour. Will was granted unpaid leave, authorized, to the puzzlement of some at the precinct, by the deputy commissioner for legal affairs, Frank Mancuso. Will went north to join his wife, and when they returned to New York they did so with a child, and a tale of a difficult, premature birth. They named the boy Charlie, after his father’s uncle, Charles Edward Parker, who had died at Monte Cassino. The secret friends kept their distance, and it was many years before Will heard from any of them again. And when they did make contact, it was Epstein who was sent, Epstein who told him that the thing they had long feared was upon them once more.

  The lovers had returned.

  21

  Mickey Wallace felt as though the mist had followed him from Maine. Tendrils of it drifted past his face, reacting to each movement of his body like a living thing, slowly assuming new shapes before slipping away altogether, as though the darkness were weaving itself into being around him, enfolding him in its embrace as he stood before the small house on Hobart Street in Bay Ridge.

  Bay Ridge was almost a suburb of Brooklyn, a neighborhood unto itself. Originally it had consisted mostly of Norwegians, who lived there when it was known as Yellow Hook in the nineteenth century, and Greeks, with some Irish thrown in, as there always were, but the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the 1970s had changed that makeup as people began to move out to Staten Island, and by the early 1990s Bay Ridge was becoming progressively more Middle Eastern. The bridge dominated the southern end of the area, although Mickey had always felt that it looked more real by night than by day. The lights seemed to give it substance; during the day, by contrast, it looked like a painted backdrop, a gray mass too big for the buildings and streets below.

  Hobart Street lay between Marine Avenue and Shore Road, where a series of benches overlooked Shore Road Park, a steep, tree-lined slope leading down to the Belt Parkway and the waters of the Narrows. At first glance, Hobart seemed to consist only of apartment buildings, but on one side was a small row of brownstone, one-family homes, each separated from its neighbor by a driveway. Only 1219 bore the marks of abandonment an
d neglect.

  The presence of the mist reminded Mickey of what he had experienced out at Scarborough. Now, once again, he was standing before a house that he believed to be empty. This was not his neighborhood, not even his city, yet he did not feel out of place here. After all, it was a crucial element in the story that he had followed for so long, the story that he was now going to set down in print. He had stood here before over the years. The first time was after Charlie Parker’s wife and child had been found, their blood still fresh on the walls and floor. The second time was after Parker had tracked down the Traveling Man, when the reporters had an ending to their story and sought to remind viewers and readers of the beginning. Lights shone upon the walls and windows, and neighbors came onto the street to watch, their proximity to the action a good indication of their willingness to talk about what had happened there. Even those who were not residents at the time had opinions, for ignorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.

  But that was a long time ago. Mickey wondered how many people even remembered what had taken place behind those walls, then figured that anyone who had lived in this place when the murders were committed, and who continued to live here now, would find it hard to erase the memory of them. In a way, the house challenged them to forget its past. It was the only unoccupied residence on the street, and its exterior spoke eloquently of its emptiness. For those who knew of its history, the simple sight of it, its very otherness, would be enough to evoke memories. For them, there would always be blood on its walls.

  Mickey’s search of the property records indicated that there had been three different occupants in the years since the killings, and the house was currently owned by the bank that had taken possession of it after the most recent residents had defaulted on their payments. He found it hard to imagine why anyone would want to live in a place that had known such violence. True, the house had probably initially been sold for far less than its market value, and the cleaners employed to scrub every visible trace of the killings from within would have done their job well, but Mickey felt certain that something must have lingered, some trace of the agonies that had been endured there. Physical? Yes. There would be dried blood between the cracks in the floor. He had been told that one of Susan Parker’s fingernails had not been recovered from the scene. Initially, it was thought that her killer had taken it as a souvenir, but now it was believed that it had broken as she scraped at the boards and had slipped between them. Despite repeated searches, it had not been found. It was probably still down there somewhere, lying amid dust and wood chips and lost coins.

  But it was not the physical aspects that interested Mickey. He had been to many murder sites, and had grown attuned to their atmosphere. There were some places that, had one not known in advance of the killings that had occurred in them, might well have seemed normal and undisturbed. Flowers grew in yards beneath which children had once been buried. A little girl’s playroom, painted in bright oranges and yellows, banished all memories of the old woman who had died there, smothered during a botched burglary when this was still her bedroom. Couples made love in rooms where husbands had beaten wives to death and women had stabbed errant lovers while they slept. Such sites were not tainted by the violence to which they had played host.

  But there were other gardens and other houses that would never be the same after blood was spilled upon them. People sensed that something was wrong as soon as they set foot on the property. It didn’t matter that the house was clean, that the yard was well tended, that the door was freshly painted. Instead, an echo remained, like the slow fading of a final cry, and it triggered an atavistic response. Sometimes the echo was so pronounced that even the demolition of the premises and the construction of a replacement markedly different from its predecessor was not enough to counter the malign influences that remained. Mickey had visited a condo in Long Island built on the site of a house that had burned down with five children and their mother inside, a fire set by the father of two of the children. The old lady who lived down the street told him that, on the night they died, the firemen could hear the children crying for help, but the heat of the flames was too intense, and they were not able to rescue them. The newly built condo had smelled of smoke, Mickey recalled; smoke, and charred meat. Nobody who lived there stayed longer than six months. On the day that he had inspected it, all of the apartments were available for rent.

  Perhaps that was why the Parker house still stood. Even to have knocked it down would have made no difference. The blood had seeped through the house and into the soil beneath, and the air was filled with the sound of screams stifled by a gag.

  Mickey had never been inside 1219 Hobart. He had seen pictures of the interior, though. He had prints of them in his possession as he stood at the gate. Tyrrell had provided them, dropping them off at Mickey’s hotel earlier that day, along with a terse note apologizing for some of the things that he had said in the course of their meeting. Mickey didn’t know how he had come by them. He figured that Tyrrell must have retained his own private file on Charlie Parker after he left the department. Mickey was pretty sure that was illegal, but he wasn’t about to complain. He’d looked at the photos in his hotel room, and even after all that he’d seen as a reporter, and his own knowledge of the details of the Parker killings, they had still shaken him.

  There was so much blood.

  Mickey had approached the Realtor appointed by the bank to oversee the most recent sale of the property, and told the woman responsible that he was interested in buying and refurbishing the house. She hadn’t mentioned anything about its history when they had spoken on the phone, which was hardly surprising, and she’d jumped at the chance to show him around. Then she’d asked his name and, when he told her, her manner changed.

  ‘I don’t think that it would be appropriate for me to show you that property, sir,’ she had said.

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘I think you know why. I don’t believe you’re serious about your inquiry.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that we’re aware of who you are, and of what you’re doing. I don’t think admitting you to the Hobart Street property would be helpful to any future sale.’

  Mickey had hung up. He should have known better than to use his real name, but he hadn’t expected Parker to obstruct him in that way, assuming it was Parker who had made the call to the Realtor. He remembered Tyrrell’s stated belief that someone was protecting Parker. If that was true, then a person or persons as yet unknown might have alerted the Realtor to what Mickey was doing. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t above bending the law a little to suit his own purposes, and breaking into the old Parker house didn’t strike him as a felony, no matter what a judge might say.

  He was pretty certain that the house wouldn’t have an alarm. It had been vacant for too long, and he didn’t figure that a Realtor would want to be disturbed in the dead of night because an alarm was ringing in an unoccupied property. He checked to make sure that the street was quiet, then made his way up the drive to the gate at the side of the house, a grassless yard beyond. He tried the gate. It didn’t move. For a moment he thought it might be locked, but he could see no way that it could be unless it had been welded shut. Simultaneously, he pushed down on the handle and pressed the weight of his body against the gate. He felt it give, the metal of the handle scraping against the concrete pillar, and then it opened. He stepped through and closed it behind him, then turned the corner of the house so that he was hidden from view.

  The back door had two locks, but the wood was damp and rotting. He tested it with his fingernails and pieces of it fell to the ground. He took the crowbar from beneath his coat and began working at the wood. Within minutes, he had made a gap big enough to gain access to the top lock. He inserted the crowbar as far as it would go, then pushed sideways and up. There was a cracking sound from inside, and the lock broke. He moved on to the second lock. The frame quickly splintered and the bolt broke through the wood.

&nb
sp; Mickey stood on the step and stared into the kitchen. This was where it had happened. This was the place in which Parker – Parker the revenger, Parker the hunter, Parker the executioner – had been born. Before the deaths of his wife and daughter, he had been just another face on the street: a cop, but not a very good one; a father and a husband, and not much good in those roles either; a man who drank some – not enough to qualify as an alcoholic, not yet, but enough that, in years to come, he might find himself starting on the booze a little earlier each day until at last it became a way to start the day instead of finishing it; a drifter, a being without purpose. Then, on a December night, the creature that became known as the Traveling Man entered this place and took the lives of the woman and child within, while the man who should have protected them sat on a bar stool feeling sorry for himself.

  Those deaths had given him purpose. At first it was revenge, but that gave way to something deeper, something more curious. The desire for revenge alone would have destroyed him, eating away at him like a cancer, so that even when he found the release for which he had yearned, the disease would already have colonized his soul, slowly blackening his humanity until, shriveled and rotten, it was lost forever. No, Parker had found a greater purpose. He was a man who could not easily turn away from the suffering of others, for he found its twin deep within himself. He was tormented by empathy. More than that, he had become a magnet for evil, or perhaps it would be truer to say that a shard of evil deep within himself resonated in the presence of a greater foulness, and drew him to it, and it to him.

  All of this, born in blood.

  Mickey closed the door, flicked on his flashlight, and walked through the kitchen, looking neither right nor left, taking in nothing of what he saw there. He would conclude his visit in that room, just as the Traveling Man had done. He wanted to follow the killer’s trail, to view this house as the killer had viewed it, and as Parker had seen it on the night that he returned home to find what was left of his wife and child.