The Charlie Parker Collection 5-8: The Black Angel, The Unquiet, The Reapers, The Lovers

by John Connolly

  But Walter wasn’t finished.

  ‘You know what else is covered by the Unit Five order? The deaths of Susan and Jennifer Parker.’

  ‘So what’s Unit Five?’ I asked.

  ‘I think you are,’ said Walter.

  I met Dave at Arabica, at the corner of Free and Cross, which, as well as having some of the best coffee in town, now occupied the best space, with art on the walls and light pouring through its big picture windows. The Pixies were playing in the background. All things considered, it was hard to find fault with the place.

  Dave wasn’t overjoyed at being asked to give me time away from the bar, and I could hardly blame him. He was about to lose two staff, one to maternity and the other to a girlfriend in California. I knew he felt that he was spending too much time doing general bar work and too little time on paperwork and accounts. I had been hired to take some of that burden off him, and instead I was leaving him mired even more deeply than he had been before I arrived.

  ‘I’m trying to run a business here, Charlie,’ said Dave. ‘You’re killing me.’

  ‘We’re not real busy, Dave,’ I said. ‘Gary can take care of the Nappi delivery, and then I’ll be back in time for next week’s truck. We’re overstocked on some of the microbrews anyway, so we can let them run down.’

  ‘What about tomorrow night?’

  ‘Nadine’s been asking for extra shifts. Let her take up some of the slack.’

  Dave buried his face in his hands.

  ‘I hate you,’ he said.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Take your week off. If we’re still here when you get back, you owe me. You owe me big time.’

  That night did nothing to improve Dave’s mood. Somebody tried to steal the ornamental bear head from the dining room, and we only spotted that it was missing when the thief was about to drive from the parking lot with the head sticking out of the passenger window. We were hit by cocktail freaks, so that even Gary, who seemed to have a better knowledge of cocktails than most, was forced to resort to the cheat sheet kept behind the bar. Students ordered rounds of cherry bombs and Jäger bombs, and the sickly smell of Red Bull tainted the air. We changed fifteen kegs, three times as many as the average for an evening although still some way off the record of twenty-two.

  And there was also sex in the air. There was a woman in her fifties at the far end of the bar who couldn’t have been more predatory if she’d had claws and razor teeth, and she was soon joined by two or three others to form a pack. The bartenders called them ‘flossies’ after a semimythical dental supplies saleswoman who was reputed to have serviced a series of men in the parking lot over the course of a night. Eventually, they attracted a couple of International Players of the World to themselves, macho types whose aftershave fought a battle of the fragrances with the lingering odor of Red Bull. At one point, I considered turning a hose on them all to cool them down, but before the need arose they departed for a darker corner of town.

  By the time 1 a.m. arrived, all fifteen staff were exhausted, but nobody wanted to go home just yet. After the beer towers were cleaned and the coolers stocked, we fixed some burgers and fries, and most people had a drink to unwind. We turned off the satellite system that provided music for the bar, and instead put a mellow iPod playlist on shuffle: Sun Kil Moon, Fleet Foxes, the reissue of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue. Finally, people started to drift away, and Dave and I checked that everything was off in the kitchen, snuffed the last of the candles, checked the bathrooms to make sure everyone was out, then put the cash in the safe and locked up. We said good-bye in the parking lot, and before we went our separate ways, Dave told me again that he hated me again.

  After I had opened the front door of my house, I paused at the threshold and listened. My encounter with Mickey Wallace, and his story about the two figures he had glimpsed, had unsettled me. I had let those ghosts go. They didn’t belong here any longer. Yet, as before, when I had gone through the house after Wallace’s departure, I experienced no sense of dread, no true unease. Instead, the house was quiet, and I felt its emptiness. Whatever had been here was now gone.

  The message light on my answering machine was flashing. I hit the button, and heard Jimmy Gallagher’s voice. He sounded a little drunk, but the message was still clear and simple, and the timing of it preordained.

  ‘Charlie, come on down here,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

  IV

  Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

  Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Poor Richard’s Almanac

  19

  Jimmy Gallagher must have been watching for me to come, as he answered the door before I even knocked. I imagined him, for a moment, sitting at his window, his face reflected in the gathering dark, his fingers tapping on the sill, anxiously seeking the one whom he was expecting, but as I looked into his eyes I saw that there was no anxiety, no fear or concern. In truth, he appeared more relaxed than I had ever seen him. He was wearing a T-shirt over a pair of paint-stained tan pants, topped off by a Yankees hooded top and an old pair of penny loafers. He looked like a man in his twenties who had suddenly woken up from a nap to find that he had aged forty years while still being forced to wear all the same clothes. I had always believed him to be a man for whom appearance was everything, for I could never recall him without a jacket and a clean, starched shirt, often finished with a tasteful silk tie. Now, all formality had been stripped from him, and I wondered, as the night drew on and I listened to the secrets pour out of him, if those strictures he had placed on his dress had merely been one part of the defenses he had constructed to protect not only himself and his own identity, but the memories and lives of those about whom he cared.

  He didn’t say anything when he saw me. He just opened the door, nodded once, then turned around and led the way to the kitchen. I closed the door behind me and followed him. A pair of candles burned in the kitchen, one on the windowsill and a second on the table. Beside the second candle stood a bottle of good – maybe very good – red wine, a decanter, and two glasses. Jimmy tenderly touched the neck of the bottle, stroking it as though it were a beloved pet.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for an excuse to open it,’ he said. ‘But these days, I don’t seem to have too many causes for celebration. Mostly, I go to funerals. You get to my age, that’s what you do. I’ve been to three funerals already this year. They were all cops, and they all died of cancer.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t want to go that way.’

  ‘Eddie Grace is dying of cancer.’

  ‘I heard. I thought about going to see him, but Eddie and me—’ He shook his head. ‘All we had in common was your old man. When he went, Eddie and me had no reason to talk.’

  I recalled what Eddie had said to me just before I left him, about how Jimmy Gallagher had spent his life living a lie. Maybe Eddie had been referring, however obliquely, to Jimmy’s homosexuality, but I knew now that there were other lies to be uncovered, even if they were lies of omission. Still, it wasn’t for Eddie Grace to judge how any man lived his life, not in the way that he had judged Jimmy. We all presented one face to the world, and kept another hidden. Nobody could survive otherwise. As Jimmy unburdened himself, and my father’s secrets were slowly revealed to me, I came to understand how Will Parker had buckled under the weight of them, and I felt only sadness for him and for the woman he had betrayed.

  Jimmy took a corkscrew from a drawer and carefully cut the foil on the bottle before inserting the tip of the corkscrew into the cork. It took only two twists, and then a single pull, for the cork to release with a satisfying, airy pop. He looked at it to make sure that it wasn’t dry or decaying, and cast it to the side.

  ‘I used to sniff the corks,’ he said, ‘but then someone pointed out that it tells you nothing about the quality of the wine. Shame. I liked the ritual of it, until I found out that it made me look like a know-nothing.’

  He positioned the candle behind the bottle as he decanted
it, so that he could see the sediment approaching the neck.

  ‘No need to let it stand for long,’ he said, once he was finished. ‘That’s just with younger wines. It softens the tannins.’

  He poured two glasses, and sat. He held his glass to the candlelight to examine it, lifted it to his nose, sniffed, then swirled the wine around before sniffing again, holding the bowl in his hands to warm it. Finally, he tasted it, moving the wine around in his mouth, savoring the flavors.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said, then raised his glass in a toast. ‘To your old man.’

  ‘To my old man,’ I echoed. I sipped the wine. It tasted rich and earthy.

  ‘Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, ninety-five,’ said Jimmy. ‘A pretty good year for burgundy. That’s a six hundred dollar bottle of wine we’re drinking.’

  ‘What are we celebrating?’

  ‘The end.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of secrets and lies.’

  I put my glass down. ‘So where do you want to begin?’

  ‘With the dead baby,’ he said. ‘With the first dead baby.’

  Neither of them had wanted to work the 12 to 8 that week, but that was the way the cookie had crumbled, them was the breaks, or whatever other cliché one might have decided to apply to a situation when there was only one end of the stick to grasp, and it wasn’t the fragrant end. That evening, the precinct was holding a party at the Ukrainian National Home over on Second Avenue, which always smelled of borscht and pierogi and barley soup from the restaurant on the first floor, and where the director Sidney Lumet would rehearse his movies before beginning filming, so that, over time, Paul Newman and Katharine Hepburn, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando would all walk up and down the same steps as the cops of the Ninth. The party was to celebrate the fact that three of its officers had been awarded combat crosses that month, the name given to the green bars received by those who had been involved in a shootout. The Ninth was already the Wild West back then: cops were dying. If it came down to you and the other guy, you shot first and worried about the paperwork later.

  New York then wasn’t like it was now. In the summer of ’64, the racial tensions in the city had come to a head with the killing of fifteen-year-old James Powell in Harlem by an off-duty patrolman. What started out as orderly protests against the killing turned into riots on July 18th, when a crowd gathered at the 123 in Harlem shouting, ‘Murderers!’ at the cops inside. Jimmy and Will had been sent up as part of the reinforcements, bottles and bricks and garbage-can lids raining down on them, looters helping themselves to food and radios and even weapons from the neighborhood stores. Jimmy could still recall a police captain pleading with the rioters to go home, and hearing someone laugh and call back: ‘We are home, white boy!’

  After five days of rioting in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, one person was dead, 520 had been arrested, and the writing was on the wall for Mayor Wagner. His days had already been numbered, even before the riots. The annual murder rate had doubled to six hundred a year under his administration, and even before the Powell shooting the city had been reeling from the murder, in her middle-class Queens neighborhood, of a woman named Kitty Genovese who was stabbed in the course of three separate assaults by the same man, Winston Moseley, twelve people witnessing or hearing the murder while it was in progress, most of them declining to intervene in any way beyond calling the cops. It was felt that the city was coming apart, and Wagner bore the brunt of the blame.

  None of these concerns about the state of the city came as news to the men of the Ninth. The Ninth was affectionately known as ‘the Shithouse’ by those who served there, less affectionately so by everyone else. They were a law unto themselves, the men of that precinct, and they guarded their territory well, keeping an eye out not only for the bad guys but for some of the good guys too, like captains looking to kick ass on a slow day. ‘Fly in the Shithouse,’ someone would call in over the radio, and then everyone would stand a little straighter for as long as was necessary.

  Jimmy and Will were ambitious back then, both looking to make sergeant as soon as possible. The competition was tougher than before, since Felicia Spritzer’s lawsuit in 1963 that resulted in female officers being allowed to take promotional examinations for the first time, with Spritzer and Gertrude Schimmel making sergeant the following year. Not that Jimmy and Will gave a rat’s ass, unlike some of the older guys who had a lot of views on where a woman’s place was, none of which included wearing three stripes in one of their precincts. They both had a copy of the patrol guide, thick as a Bible in its blue plastic ring binder, and they carried the guide with them whenever they took a break so that they could test each other’s knowledge. In those days, you had to do detective work as a patrol officer for five years before you could make detective, but you wouldn’t start bringing in sergeant’s money until you made second grade. They didn’t want to be investigators anyway. They were street cops. So they decided that they’d both try for the sergeant’s exam, even if it meant that they’d have to leave the Ninth, maybe even have to serve in different precincts. It would be tough, but they knew that their friendship would survive it.

  Unlike a lot of other cops, who worked as bouncers, keeping the guineas from Brooklyn out of the clubs, or as bodyguards for celebrities, which was boring, they didn’t have second jobs. Jimmy was a single man, and Will wanted to spend more time with his wife, not less. There was still a lot of corruption in the force, but it was mostly small-time stuff. In due course, drugs would change everything, and the commissions would come down hard on bent cops. For now, the best that could be hoped for would be the occasional dollar job: escorting the movie theater manager to the night safe with the day’s takings, and getting a couple of bucks for drinks left on the back seat in return. Even taking lunch ‘on the arm’ would soon come to be frowned upon, though most places in the Ninth didn’t do it anyway. Cops paid for their own lunches, their own coffee and donuts. The majority ate lunch at the precinct house. It was cheaper, and there weren’t too many places to eat in the Ninth anyway, at least none that the cops liked, the ham and cheddar with hot mustard at McSorley’s apart, or, in later years, Jack the Ribbers over on 3rd, although eat lunch at Jack the Ribbers and you weren’t going to be doing anything more strenuous than rubbing your stomach and groaning for the rest of the day. The guys in the Seventh were lucky, because they had Katz’s, but the cops in the Ninth weren’t allowed to cross precinct lines just because the bologna was better down the block. The NYPD didn’t work that way.

  On the night of the first dead baby, Jimmy was working as recorder for the first half of the tour. The recorder took all of the notes and the driver took the wheel. Halfway through, they switched. Jimmy was the better recorder. He had a good eye and a sharp memory. Will had just enough recklessness to make him the better driver. Together, they made a good team.

  They were called to a party over on Avenue A, a ‘10–50,’ some neighbors complaining about the noise. When they got to the building, a young woman was puking into the gutter while her friend held her hair away from her face and stroked her back. They were so stoned that they barely glanced at the two cops.

  Jimmy and Will could hear music coming from the top floor of the walk-up. As a matter of course, they kept their hands on the grips of their guns. There was no way of telling if this was just a regular party that was getting a little out of hand or something more serious. As always in these situations, Jimmy felt his mouth go dry, and his heart began to beat faster. A week earlier, a guy had taken a flight off the top of a tenement in the course of a party that had started off just like this one. He’d almost killed one of the cops who was arriving to investigate, landing just inches from him and spraying him with blood when he hit. Turned out that the flyer had been skimming from some guys with vowels at the ends of their names, Italians who were applying their business acumen to the newly resurgent heroin market, which had been largely dormant since the teens and twenties, the Italians not yet realizing that their time was coming to
an end, their dominance soon to be challenged by the blacks and the Colombians.

  The apartment door was open, and music blared from a stereo, Jagger singing about some girl. They could see a narrow hallway, leading into a living area, and the air was thick with tobacco and booze and grass. The two officers exchanged a look.

  ‘Call it,’ said Will.

  They stepped into the hall, Jimmy leading. ‘NYPD,’ he shouted. ‘Everybody stay calm, and stay still.’

  Cautiously, Will behind him, Jimmy peered into the living room. There were eight people in various stages of intoxication or drug-induced stupor. Most were sitting or lying on the floor. Some were clearly asleep. A young white woman with purple stripes through her blond hair was stretched out on the couch beneath the window, a cigarette dangling from her hand. When she saw the cops she said: ‘Oh shit,’ and began to get up.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Jimmy, motioning with his left hand that she should remain on the couch. Now one or two of the more together partygoers were waking up to the trouble they might be in, and looking scared. While Jimmy kept an eye on the people in the living room, Will checked the rest of the apartment. There was a small bedroom with two beds: one an empty child’s cot, the other a double piled with coats. He found a young man, probably nineteen or twenty, and barely compos mentis, on his knees in the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully to flush an ounce of marijuana down a toilet with a broken cistern. When he frisked him, Will found three twists of heroin in one of the pockets of the kid’s jeans.

  ‘What are you, an idiot?’ Will asked.