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

by John Connolly

  ‘Huh?’ said the kid.

  ‘You’re carrying heroin, but you flush the marijuana? You in college?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Bet you’re not studying to be a rocket scientist. You know how much trouble you’re in?’

  ‘But, man,’ said the kid, staring at the twists, ‘that shit is worth money!’

  Will almost felt sorry for him, he was so dumb. ‘Come on, knucklehead,’ he said. He pushed him into the living room and told him to sit on the floor.

  ‘Okay,’ said Jimmy. ‘The rest of you, against the walls. You got anything I should know about, you tell me now and it’ll go easier on you.’

  Those who were able to rose and assumed the position against the walls. Will nudged one comatose girl with his foot.

  ‘Come on, sleeping beauty. Nap time’s over.’

  Eventually, they had all nine standing. Will frisked eight of them, excluding the boy he had searched earlier. Only the girl with the striped hair was carrying: three joints, and a four-ounce bag. She was both drunk and high, but was coming down from the worst of it.

  ‘What are these?’ Will asked the girl.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the girl. Her voice was slightly slurred. ‘A friend gave them to me to look after for him.’

  ‘That’s some story. What’s your friend’s name? Hans Christian Andersen?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. This your place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sandra.’

  ‘Sandra what?’

  ‘Sandra Huntingdon.’

  ‘Well, Sandra, you’re under arrest for possession with intent to supply.’ He cuffed her and read her her rights, then did the same with the boy he had searched earlier. Jimmy took the names of the rest, and told them that they were free to stay or to leave, but if he passed them on the street again he’d bust them for loitering, even if they were running a race at the time. All of them went back to sitting around. They were young and scared, and they were gradually coming to realize how lucky they were not to be in cuffs, like their buddies, but they weren’t together enough to head out into the night just yet.

  ‘Okay, time to go,’ Will said to the two in cuffs. He began to lead Huntingdon from the apartment, Jimmy behind him with the boy, whose name was Howard Mason, but suddenly something seemed to flare in Huntingdon’s brain, cutting through the drug fog.

  ‘My baby,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave my baby!’

  ‘What baby?’ asked Will.

  ‘My little girl. She’s two. I can’t leave her alone.’

  ‘Miss, there’s no child in this apartment. I searched it myself.’

  But she struggled against him. ‘I’m telling you, my baby is here,’ she shouted, and he could tell that she wasn’t faking or deluded.

  One of the group in the living room, a black man in his twenties with a beginner’s Afro, said, ‘She ain’t lyin’, man. She do have a baby.’

  Jimmy looked at Will. ‘You sure you searched the place?’

  ‘It’s not Central Park.’

  ‘Hell.’ He turned Mason back toward the living room. ‘You, sit on the couch and don’t move,’ he told him. ‘Okay, Sandra, you say you have a kid. Let’s find her. What’s her name?’

  ‘Melanie.’

  ‘Melanie, right. You’re sure you didn’t ask someone to look after her for the evening?’

  ‘No, she’s here.’ Huntingdon was crying now. ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘Well, we’ll soon find out.’

  There weren’t very many places to search, but they called the girl’s name just the same. The two cops searched behind the couches, in the bathtub, and in the kitchen closets.

  It was Will who found her. She was under the pile of coats on the bed. He could tell that the child was dead from the moment that his hand touched her leg.

  Jimmy took a sip of wine.

  ‘The kid must have wanted to lie on her mother’s bed,’ he said. ‘Maybe she crawled under the first coat for warmth, then fell asleep. The other coats were just piled on top of her, and she suffocated under them. I can still remember the sound her mother made when we found her. It came from someplace deep and old. It was like an animal dying. And then she just folded to the floor, her arms still cuffed behind her. She crawled to the bed on her knees and started to burrow under the coats with her head, trying to get close to her little girl. We didn’t stop her. We just stood there, watching her.

  ‘She wasn’t a bad mother. She worked two jobs, and her aunt looked after her kid while she was at work. Maybe she was doing a little dealing on the side, but the autopsy found that her daughter was healthy and well cared for. Apart from the night of the party, nobody ever had any cause to complain about her. What I’m saying is that it could have happened to anyone. It was a tragedy, that’s all. It was nobody’s fault.

  ‘Your old man, though, he took it bad. He went on a bender the next day. Back then, your father could drink some. When you knew him, he’d cut all that stuff out, apart from the occasional night out with the boys. But in the old days, he liked a drink. We all did.

  ‘That day was different, though. I’d never seen him drink the way he did after he found Melanie Huntingdon. I think it was because of his own circumstances. He and your mother wanted a child real bad, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen for them. Then he sees this little kid lying dead under a pile of coats, and something breaks inside him. He believed in God. He went to church. He prayed. That night, it must have seemed as if God was mocking him just for the hell of it, forcing a man who had seen his wife miscarry again and again to uncover the body of a dead child. Worse than that, maybe he stopped believing in any kind of God for a time, as if someone had just pulled up a corner of the world and revealed black, empty space behind it. I don’t know. Anyway, finding the Huntingdon kid changed him, that’s all I can say. After it, he and your mother went through a real rough patch. I think she was going to leave him, or he was going to leave her, I don’t recall which. Wouldn’t have mattered, I suppose. The end result would still have been the same.’

  He put the glass down and let the candlelight play upon the wine, spreading red fractals upon the tabletop like the ghosts of rubies.

  ‘And that was when he met the girl,’ he said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Her name was Caroline Carr, or that was what she said. They had responded to an attempted B and E call at her apartment. It was the smallest apartment they had ever seen, barely large enough to contain a single bed, a closet, and a table and chair. The kitchen area consisted of two gas rings in one corner, and the bathroom was so tiny that it didn’t even have a door, just lengths of beaded string for privacy. It was hard to see why anyone might have considered it worth breaking into. One look around told them that the girl didn’t have anything worth stealing. If she had, she would have sold it to rent a bigger place.

  But the space suited her. She was tiny, just a shade over five feet tall, and thin with it. Her hair was long and dark and very fine, and her skin was translucently pale. It seemed to Jimmy as if she might expire at any minute, but when he looked in her eyes he saw a real strength and ferocity at her core. She might have appeared fragile, but so did spider silk until you tried to break it.

  She was frightened, though, of that he was certain. At the time, he put it down to the attempted burglary. Someone had clearly tried to jimmy the lock on the window from the fire escape outside. She had woken to the noise, and had immediately run to the phone in the hallway outside to call the cops. One of her neighbors, an elderly woman named Mrs. Roth, had heard her screaming and offered her safe haven in her apartment until the police came. As it happened, Jimmy and Will had been only a block away when the call from Central came through. Whoever had tried to break in was probably still at the window when the sirens began to sound. They filled out a 61, but there wasn’t much more that they could do. The perps were gone, and no harm had been done. Will suggest
ed talking to the landlord about getting a better lock for the window, or maybe a security grill of some kind, but Carr just shook her head.

  ‘I won’t be staying here,’ she said. ‘I’m going to leave.’

  ‘It’s the big city,’ said Will. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘I understand. I have to move, though.’

  Her fear was palpable, but it wasn’t unreasoning, and it wasn’t merely an overreaction to a disturbing, if commonplace, incident. Whatever was frightening her, it was related only in part to the events of that night.

  ‘Your father must have felt it too,’ said Jimmy. ‘He was quiet as we drove away. We stopped to pick up a couple of coffees, and as we sat drinking them, he said: “What do you suppose that was about?”

  ‘“It’s going down as a ten-thirty-one. That’s all there is to it.”

  ‘“But that woman was scared.”

  ‘“She lives alone in a shoebox. Someone tries to break in, she hasn’t got too many places to run.”

  ‘“No, it’s more than that. She didn’t tell us everything.”

  ‘“What are you now, psychic?”

  ‘Then he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He just stared me down.

  ‘“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I felt it too. You want to go back?”

  ‘“No, not now. Maybe later.”

  ‘But we never did go back. At least, I didn’t. Your father did, though. He went back. He might even have gone back that night, after the tour ended.

  ‘And that was how it began.’

  Will told Jimmy that he didn’t sleep with Caroline until the third time they met. He claimed that it had never been his intention to get involved with her in that way, but there was something about her, something that made him want to help her and protect her. Jimmy didn’t know whether to believe him or not, and he didn’t suppose it mattered much one way or another. There had always been a sentimental streak to Will Parker and, as Jimmy liked to say, quoting Oscar Wilde, ‘sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism.’ Will was having problems at home and he was still troubled by the death of Melanie Huntingdon, so maybe he saw the possibility of some kind of escape in the form of Caroline Carr. He helped her to move. He found her a place on the Upper East Side, with more space and better security. He put her in a motel for two nights while he negotiated the rent down on her behalf, then drove into the city one morning instead of taking the train and put all of her belongings, which didn’t amount to much, in the back of his car and took her to her new apartment. The affair didn’t last longer than six or seven weeks.

  During that time, she became pregnant.

  I waited. I had finished my wine, but when Jimmy tried to refill my glass I covered it with my hand. I felt light-headed, but it was nothing to do with the wine.

  ‘Pregnant?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’ He lifted the wine bottle. ‘You mind if I do? It makes all this easier. I’ve been waiting a long time to get rid of it.’

  He filled the glass halfway.

  ‘She had something, that Caroline Carr,’ said Jimmy. ‘Even I could see that.’

  ‘Even you?’ Despite myself, I smiled.

  ‘She wasn’t to my taste,’ he said, smiling back. ‘I hope I don’t need to say any more than that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘That wasn’t all of it, though. Your father was a good-looking man. There were a lot of women out there who’d have been happy to ease him of some of his burdens, no strings attached. He wouldn’t have been obliged to buy them more than a drink. Instead, here he was finding a place for this woman and lying to his wife about where he was going so that he could help her move.’

  ‘You think he was infatuated with her?’

  ‘That’s what I believed at the start. She was younger than he was, though not by much and, like I said, she had a certain allure. I think it was tied up with the impression of fragility that she gave, even if it was deceptive. So, yeah, sure, I thought it was an infatuation, and maybe it was, at the start. But later, Will told me the rest of it, or as much of it as he wanted to tell me. That was when I started to understand, and that’s when I started to worry.’

  His brow furrowed, and I could tell that, even now, decades later, he struggled with this part of the story.

  ‘We were in Cal’s on the night Will told me that Caroline Carr was convinced she was being hunted. I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t. Then I started to wonder if the girl had spun him some line of bullshit. You know, damsel in distress, bad men on the horizon: shitty boyfriend, maybe, or psycho ex-husband.

  ‘But that wasn’t it. She was convinced that whoever, whatever, was hunting her wasn’t human. She talked about two people, a man and a woman. She told your father that they’d started hunting her years before. She’d been running from them ever since.’

  ‘And my father believed her?’

  Jimmy laughed. ‘Are you kidding me? He might have been a sentimentalist, but he wasn’t a fool. He thought she was a wacko. He figured he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He had visions of her stalking him, arriving at his house decked out in garlic and crucifixes. Your old man might have gone off the rails a little, but he was still capable of driving the train. So, no, he didn’t believe her, and I think he started trying to disentangle himself from the whole mess. I guess he also realized that he ought to be with his wife, that leaving her wouldn’t solve any of his problems but would just give him a whole new set of them to deal with.

  ‘Then Caroline told him she was pregnant, and his world collapsed around him. They had a long talk on the evening of her visit to the clinic to get checked out. She never even mentioned abortion, and your father, to his credit, never raised it either. It wasn’t just because he was Catholic. I think he still recalled that little girl buried under the pile of coats, and his wife’s miscarriages. Even if it meant the end of his marriage, and a life of debt, he wasn’t going to suggest that the pregnancy should be terminated. And Caroline, you know, she was really calm about the whole thing. Not happy, exactly, but calm, like the pregnancy was a minor medical procedure, a thing that was worrying but necessary.

  ‘Your father, well, he was kind of shocked. He needed some air, so he left her and went to take a walk. He decided, after thirty minutes of his own company, that he wanted to talk to someone, so he stopped at a pay phone across from her apartment and started to call me.

  ‘And that was when he saw them.’

  They were standing in a doorway close by a convenience store, hand in hand: a man and a woman, both in their early thirties. The woman had mousy hair that brushed her shoulders, and she wore no makeup. She was slim, and dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt that clung to her legs before flaring slightly at her shins. A matching black jacket hung open over a white blouse that was buttoned to the neck. The man wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. His hair was short at the back and long in front, parted on the left and hanging greasily over one eye. Both of them were staring up at the window of Caroline Carr’s apartment.

  It was their very stillness that drew Will’s attention to them. They were like pieces of statuary that had been positioned in the shadows, a temporary art installation on a busy street. Their appearance reminded him of those sects in Pennsylvania, the ones that frowned upon buttons as signs of vanity. In their utter focus on the windows of the apartment, he saw a fanaticism that bordered on the religious.

  And then, as Will watched them, they began to move. They crossed the street, the man reaching beneath his jacket as he went, and Will saw the gun appear in his hand.

  He ran. He had his own .38 with him, and he drew it. The couple was halfway across the street when something drew the man’s attention. He registered the approaching threat, and turned to face it. The woman continued moving, her attention fixed only on the apartment building before her and the girl who was hiding within, but the man stared straight at Parker, and the policeman felt a slow tightening in his gut, as though someone
had just pumped cold water into his system and it was responding with the urge to void itself. Even at this distance, he could tell that the man’s eyes were not right. They were at once too dark, like twin voids in the pallor of the gunman’s face, and too small, chips of black glass in a borrowed skin pulled too tightly over a larger skull.

  The woman looked around, only now becoming aware that her partner was no longer beside her. She opened her mouth to say something, and Parker saw the panic on her face.

  The truck hit the gunman from behind, briefly pitching him forward and upward, his feet leaving the ground before he was dragged beneath the front wheels as the driver braked, his body disintegrating beneath the massive weight of the truck, his life ending in a smear of red and black. The force of the impact knocked him out of his shoes. They lay nearby, one upside down, the other on its side. A tendril of blood seeped out toward the shoes from the broken form under the truck, as though the body were trying to reconstitute itself, to build itself once again from the feet up. Somebody screamed.

  By the time Will reached the body, the woman had disappeared. He glanced under the truck. The man’s head was gone, crushed by the left front wheel of the truck. He showed his shield, and told an ashen-faced man standing nearby to call in the accident. The driver climbed down from his cab and tried to grab hold of Will, but he slipped by him and was only barely aware of the driver falling to the ground behind him. He ran to Caroline’s building, but the front door was still locked. He inserted the key and opened the door by touch, his attention fixed on the street, not the keyhole. As the key turned he slipped inside and closed the door hard behind him. When he got to the apartment he stood to one side, trying to control his breathing, and knocked once.

  ‘Caroline?’ he called.

  There was no reply for a moment, then, softly: ‘Yes.’

  ‘You okay, honey?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Open up.’

  His eyes searched the shadows. He thought that he could smell a strange perfume on the air. It was sharp and metallic. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the smell of the dead man’s blood. He looked down and saw that it was on his shoes.