"What do they look like?" I asked, but I already had my suspicions.
"That's the problem. Nothing on Abel, 'cept he's tall with silver, almost white, hair. But Stritch, the torturer… The guy is a fucking freak show: small, with a wide, bald head, a mouth long as the slit in a toaster. Looks like Uncle Fester but without the good nature."
I thought of the strange, goblinlike man outside the inn, the same man who had later turned up at Java Joe's ostensibly proselytizing for the Lord, with his crudely drawn picture of a mother and child and his soft, implicit threats.
"I've seen him," I said.
Louis wiped his hand across his mouth. I had never before found him so concerned about the threat posed by anyone. In my mind, I still had an image of the darkness coming alive in an old warehouse back in Queens and one of the city's most feared killers rising up on his toes, his mouth wide, as Louis's blade entered the base of his skull. Louis didn't frighten easily. I told him about the car and the encounter in the coffee shop, and the lawyer named Leo Voss.
"My guess is that Voss was their point of contact, the guy people came to if they wanted to hire Abel and Stritch," said Louis. "If he's dead, then they killed him. They're closing down the operation, and they don't want any loose ends. If Stritch is here, then so is Abel. They don't work separately. He make any other move?"
"No. I got the feeling he just wanted to make his presence felt."
"Takes a special guy to drive around in a dead man's Caddy," said Angel. "Kind of guy who wants to draw attention to himself."
"Or away from someone else," I said.
"He's watching," said Louis. "So is his partner, somewhere. They're waiting to see if you can lead them to Billy Purdue." He thought for a moment. "The woman and the boy, were they tortured?"
I shook my head. "The woman was strangled. No sign of other injuries or sexual assault. The boy died because he got in the way." I recalled the sight of Rita Ferris's mouth as the cops turned her over. "There was one thing: the killer sewed the woman's mouth shut with black thread after she died."
Angel screwed up his face. "Makes no sense."
"Makes no sense if it's Abel and Stritch," agreed Louis. "They'd have ripped her fingers off and hurt the boy to find out what she knew about the money. Doesn't sound like their work."
"Or Tony Celli's," added Angel.
"The cops think Billy may have killed them," I said. "It's possible, but there's still no reason for him to mutilate the mouth."
We were silent then as we balanced and weighed what we knew. I think we all moved toward the same conclusion, but it was left to Louis to voice it:
"There's someone else."
Outside, the rain fell hard, hammering on the tiles and raking at the windowpanes. I felt a coldness at my shoulder, or perhaps it was just the memory of a touch, and the voice of the rain seemed to whisper to me in a language that I could not comprehend.
A couple of hours later, a truck arrived with some of my furniture and we set up a bed in the spare room, added some throw rugs and generally made the place look like a home away from home, as long as the original home was nothing too fancy. Then, when we had all freshened up, we drove into Portland, past the blue-and-white lights of the Christmas tree at Congress Square and the second, larger tree at Monument Square. We parked the car, then strolled down to the Stone Coast Brewing Company on York Street, where Angel and Louis drank microbrew beer while we decided where to eat.
"You got a sushi bar around here?" asked Louis.
"I don't eat seafood," I said.
"You don't eat seafood?" Louis's voice rose an octave. "The fuck you mean, you don't eat seafood? You live in Maine. Lobsters practically hand you a knife and fork and invite you to chew on their ass."
"You know I don't eat seafood," I replied patiently. "It's just a thing."
"It's not just a thing, man, it's a phobia."
Beside me, Angel smiled. It was good to be out like this, to be acting in this way, after what we had spoken of earlier.
"Sorry," I continued, "but I draw the line at anything with more than four legs, or no legs at all. I bet you even eat the lungs out of crabs."
"Lungs, the crab juice…"
"That's not juice, Louis, it's the contents of their digestive system. Why do you think it's yellow?"
He waved a hand dismissively. "Ain't no crab shit in sushi anyways."
Angel drained the last of his beer. "Well I'm with Bird on this one," he said. "Last time I was in L.A. I ate in a sushi bar. Pretty much ate them out of anything that had gills. Went outside, took one last look in the window, and the place had a 'C' grading from the health department. A fucking 'C'! I might eat in a burger joint with a C grade, worst you could expect would be a dose of Ronald McDonald's Revenge, but C-graded sushi… Man, that stuff'll kill you. Damn fish was so bad, it almost pulled a gun and tried to steal my wallet."
Louis put his head in his hands and prayed to whoever it was that people like Louis prayed to-Smith & Wesson, probably.
We ate in David's on Monument Square. As it happened, sitting three tables away from us were Samson and Doyle, the two feds I had seen at Rita Ferris's apartment, and the Toronto policeman, Eldritch. They gave us interested but unfriendly looks, then went back to their food.
"Friends of yours?" said Angel.
"The federal boys, plus their cousin from north of the border."
"Feds got no reason to like you, Bird. Not that they need a reason not to like anyone."
Our own food came: fish for Louis and beef for Angel and me. We ate in silence. The feds and Eldritch left in the course of our meal. I got the feeling that I'd be hearing from them again. When they were gone, Louis dabbed his lips carefully with a napkin and drained the last of his beer. "You got a plan of campaign on the Billy Purdue thing?"
I shrugged. "I've asked around, but he's gone to earth. Part of me says that he's here, but another part tells me that he may be heading north. If he's in trouble, my guess is that he may look for someone who's been sympathetic to him in the past, and those people are precious few. There's a guy up by Moosehead Lake in a place called Dark Hollow, acted as Billy Purdue's foster parent for a time. It may be that he knows something, or has heard from him."
I told them about my conversation in the bar with Willeford and his subsequent disappearance. "I'm also going to pay a call on Cheryl Lansing, see if she can add anything to what she told Willeford."
"Sounds like your curiosity's been sparked," remarked Angel.
"Maybe, but…"
"But?"
I didn't want to tell him about my experience the night before, no matter how much I trusted him. That was the stuff of madness. "But I owe something to Rita and her son. And, anyhow, it seems like other people have decided to involve me whether I like it or not."
"Ain't that always the way?"
"Yeah." I reached into my wallet, took out the bill from the furniture removal firm and waved it pointedly at Angel. "Ain't that always the way?" I echoed.
He smiled. "Take that attitude and we might never leave."
"Don't even go there, Angel," I warned. "And pick up the check. It's the least you can do."
CHAPTER TEN
I woke early and refreshed for the trip to Bangor. Angel and Louis were still in bed, so I drove to Oak Hill, intending to stop off at the bank to withdraw some cash for the trip north. But when I had finished, I headed on down Old County Road and onto Black Point Road, past the White Caps Sandwich Shop until I reached Ferry Road. To my left was the golf course, to my right the summer homes, and ahead of me was the parking lot where the men had died. The rain had washed away the evidence, but lengths of tattered crime scene tape still fluttered on one of the barriers as the wind howled in off the sea.
As I stood, taking in the scene, a car pulled up behind me: a cruiser driven by one of the Scarborough reserve cops, probably drafted in since the killings to keep rubberneckers away.
"You okay, sir?" he asked, as he stepped from the car
.
"Yeah, just looking," I replied. "I live up on Spring Street."
He sized me up, then nodded. "I recognize you now. Sorry, sir, but after what happened here, we have to be careful."
I waved a hand at him, but he seemed to be in the mood for conversation. He was young, certainly younger than I was, with straw-colored hair and soft, serious eyes. "Strange business," he said. "It's usually pretty quiet and peaceful here."
"You from around these parts?" I asked.
He shook his head. "No, sir. Flint, Michigan. Came east after GM screwed us over, and started again here. Best move I ever made."
"Yeah, well, this place hasn't always been so peaceful." My grandfather could trace his family's roots back to the mid-seventeenth century, maybe two decades after Scarborough was first settled in 1632 or 1633. Back then, the whole area was called Black Point and the settlement was abandoned twice because of attacks by the natives. In 1677, the Wabanaki had attacked the English fort at Black Point on two occasions. Forty English soldiers and a dozen of their Indian allies from the Protestant mission village at Natick, near Boston, died in the second assault alone. Maybe ten minutes by car from where we were standing was Massacre Pond, where Richard Hunnewell and nineteen others died in an Indian attack in 1713.
Now, with its summer homes and its yacht club, its bird sanctuary and its polite police, it was easy to forget that this was once a violent, troubled place. There was blood beneath the ground here, layer upon layer of it like the marks left in rock faces by seas that had ceased to exist hundreds of millions of years before. I sometimes felt that places retained memories-houses, lands, towns, mountains, all holding within themselves the ghosts of past experiences-and sometimes those places acted just like magnets, attracting bad luck and violence to them like iron filings. In other words, once a lot of blood was spilled somewhere, then there was a pretty good chance that it would be spilled there again.
It wasn't strange that eight men should have ended their lives so bloodily here. It wasn't strange at all.
* * *
When I returned to the house I toasted some English muffins, made coffee and had a quiet breakfast in the kitchen while Louis and Angel showered and dressed.
We had decided the night before that Louis would stay at the house, maybe take a look around Portland and see if he could find any signs of Abel and Stritch. Also, in the event that anything developed while we were away, he could call me on the cell phone and let me know.
Portland to Bangor is 125 miles north on I-95. As we drove, Angel flipped through my cassette tape collection impatiently, listening to something for one or two songs then discarding it on the back seat: The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, The Gourds out of Austin, Jim White, Doc Watson, they all ended up in the pile, so that the car started to look like a music business nightmare. I put on a Lampchop cassette, and the gentle, sad chords of I Will Drive Slowly filled the car.
"What'd you say this is?" asked Angel.
"Alternative country," I replied.
"That's when your truck starts, your wife comes back and your dog gets resurrected," he snickered.
"Willie Nelson heard you talking like that, he'd whip your ass."
"This the same Willie Nelson whose wife once tied him up in a bedsheet and beat him unconscious with a broom handle? That pothead comes after me, I reckon I can handle myself."
Eventually, we settled for a discussion of local news on PBS. There was some talk of a timber company surveyor who might have gone missing up north, but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it. At Waterville, we took the off-ramp and stopped for soup and coffee. Angel toyed with saltine crumbs as we waited for the check. He had something on his mind, and it didn't take long for it to emerge.
"Remember when I asked you about Rachel, back in New York?" he said at last.
"I remember," I replied.
"You weren't too keen on talking about it."
"I'm still not."
"Maybe you should."
There was a pause. I wondered when Louis and Angel had discussed Rachel and me, and guessed that it might have come up between them more than once. I relented a little.
"She doesn't want to see me," I said.
He pursed his lips. "And how do you feel about that?"
"You going to charge me by the hour for this?"
He flicked a crumb at me. "Just answer the question."
"Not so good but, frankly, I've got other things on my mind."
Angel's eyes glanced up at me, then back down again. "Y'know, she called once, to ask how you were."
"She called you? How'd she get your number?"
"We're in the book."
"No, you're not."
"Well, then, we must have given it to her."
"You're so helpful." I sighed, and ran my hands over my face. "I don't know, Angel. The whole thing is screwed up. I don't know if I'm ready yet and, anyway, I frighten her. She's the one who pushed me away, remember?"
"You didn't need a whole lot of pushing."
The check came, and I put down a ten and some ones on top of it. "Yeah, well… I had my reasons. Just like she did."
I stood, and Angel stood with me.
"Maybe," he said. "Pity neither of you could come up with one good reason between you."
As we drove back onto I-95, Angel stretched contentedly beside me, and as he did so, the sleeve of his oversized shirt fell down to his elbow. On his arm, a scar, white and ragged, ran from the hollow curve beneath his stringy biceps to within an inch or two of his wrist. It was maybe six inches long in total and I couldn't imagine why I hadn't noticed it before but, as I thought about it, I realized it was a combination of factors: the fact that Angel rarely wore only a T-shirt or, if he did so, it was one with long sleeves; my own self-absorption while we were in Louisiana hunting the Traveling Man; and Angel's basic lack of inclination to discuss anything about past pains.
He caught me looking at the scar and reddened, but he did not try to hide it immediately. Instead, he looked at it himself and went quiet, as if recalling its making.
"You want to know?" he asked.
"You want to tell?"
"Not particularly."
"Then don't."
He didn't respond for a time, then: "It kind of concerns you, so maybe you got a right to know."
"If you tell me you've always been in love with me, I'm stopping the car and you can walk to Bangor."
Angel laughed. "You're in denial."
"You have no idea how deep."
"Anyway, you ain't that good lookin'." He touched the scar gently with the index finger of his right hand. "You been in Rikers, right?"
I nodded. I'd been at Rikers Island in the course of investigations. I had also been there while Angel was a prisoner, when another inmate named William Vance had threatened to take Angel's life and I had intervened. Vance was dead now. He had died from injuries received after persons unknown poured detergent down his throat, after they learned that he was a suspected sex killer who would never stand trial for his crimes because of a lack of evidence. I had provided the information on which his attackers had acted. I had done it to save Angel, and Vance was no loss to the world, but it still weighed on my conscience.
"First time Vance came at me, I knocked out one of his teeth," Angel said quietly. "He'd been threatening it for days, saying how he was gonna fuck me up bad. Fucking guy just had it in for me, you know that. The blow wasn't bad or nothing, but a screw found him bleeding and me standing over him and I got twenty days in the bing."
The "bing" was solitary confinement: twenty-three-hour lockdown, with one hour's exercise permitted in the yard. The yard was basically a cage, not much bigger than a cell, and prisoners were kept handcuffed while they walked. The yard had basketball hoops but no basketballs, even assuming anyone could play basketball with cuffs on. The only thing the prisoners could do was fight, which is what they did when they were let out.
"Most of the time, I didn't leave my cell," said Angel
. "Vance had been given ten days, just for getting his mouth cut, and I knew he was waiting for me out there." He went quiet, his teeth working at his bottom lip. "You think it's going to be easy-you know, peace and quiet, sleep, safe most of the time-but it isn't. You can't bring nothing in with you. They take your clothes and give you three jumpsuits instead. You can't smoke, but I boofed the best part of a pack of tobacco in three condoms, rolled it in toilet paper to smoke it." "Boofing" meant taking contraband and inserting it in the anus in order to transport it.
"The tobacco was gone in five days, and I never smoked again. After those five days in that cell, I couldn't take it any more: the noise, the screams. It's psychological torture. I went out into the yard for the first time and Vance came at me straight off, caught me on the side of the head with his balled fists, then started kicking me on the ground. He got five, maybe six good ones in before they hauled him off, but I knew then that I couldn't take any more time in that place. There was no way I could do it.
"I was taken to the infirmary after the beating. They looked me over, decided nothing was broken, then sent me back to the bing. I brought a screw back with me, maybe three inches long, that I'd worked out of the base of a medicine cabinet. And when they put me in the cell, and the lights went out, I tried to cut myself."
He shook his head and, for the first time since he started the story, he smiled. "You ever try to cut yourself with a screw?"
"Can't say that I have."
"Well, it's kinda hard to do. Screws just weren't designed with that particular purpose in mind. After a lot of effort, I managed to get some serious blood flowing, but if I was hoping to bleed to death I'd probably have finished my twenty days before it happened. Anyway, they found me hacking away at my arm and hauled me off to the infirmary again. That's when I called you.
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