Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  This was a survivor’s city: it had burned twice at the hands of the Indians in 1676 and 1690, burned again under the guns of the Englishman Henry Mowatt in 1775 following a dispute over masts, and burned once more in 1866 when someone threw a firecracker into a boat-builder’s yard on Commercial Street and turned the eastern half of the city to ash. And still the city remained, and still it grew.

  I felt about the city as I felt about the house in Scarborough: it was a place where the past was alive in the present, where a man could find a place for himself as long as he understood the fact that he was a link in the chain, for a man cut off from his past is a man adrift in the present. Maybe that was part of Billy Purdue’s problem. There had been little stability in his life. His past was a series of unconnected episodes, united only by the un-happiness provoked by the memory of them. A man like Billy could not make a marriage work because, by and large, when one unhappy person enters a marriage it frequently ends up as two unhappy people, maybe even two unhappy people getting a divorce.

  In the end, I figured that Billy Purdue was probably none of my business. Whatever he had done to Tony Celli, for whatever reason, was between him and Tony. Billy was a big boy now and his actions at Ferry Beach meant that he was playing by big boys’ rules. So if Billy Purdue was none of my business, why did I feel that I should try to save him?

  If I stretched the point then Rita and Donald were none of my business either, but it didn’t feel that way. In their apartment, as the two bodies lay on the floor, frozen briefly by the flashbulbs of the camera, I felt something ripple through me, something I recognised from before, something that had come to me as a gift from another. In the crowded coffee shop, as people sheltered from the cold, talked about their children, gossiped about their neighbours, touched the hands of girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, I moved the fingers of my left hand gently over the palm of my right and recalled a touch more intense than that of any lover, and I smelt again the rich heady odour of the Louisiana swamps.

  Almost eight months before, I had sat in the bedroom of an old, blind woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, a huge ebony form with dead, sightless eyes whose consciousness moved through the darkness of her own life, and the lives of others. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for from her, except that she said she could hear the voice of a dead girl calling her from the swamps. I believed then that the man who killed the girl might also have been responsible for the deaths of my own wife and child – assuming the old woman wasn’t crazy, or vindictive, or just plain lonely and seeking attention.

  But when she touched my hand in that darkening room, something shot through me like a jolt of electricity and I knew that she was not lying, that somehow she heard that girl crying amid the rotting vegetation and the deep green waters, and that Tante Marie had tried to comfort her as she died.

  And through Tante Marie, I heard the voices also of Susan and Jennifer, faint but distinct, and I took those voices away with me, and on a subway train a week later my wife appeared to me for the first time. That was Tante Marie’s gift to me: I saw and heard my dead wife and child, and I saw and heard others too. Eventually, Tante Marie was among them. That was her gift, passed in the touch of a hand, and yet I could not explain it.

  I think that it may be a kind of empathy, a capacity to experience the suffering of those who have been taken painfully, brutally, without mercy. Or perhaps what I experience is a form of madness, a product of grief and guilt; maybe I am disturbed, and in my disturbance I have imagined alternative worlds where the dead seek reparation from the living. I do not know for certain. All I can say is that those who are absent, by its means become present.

  But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know. And they come.

  Despite my misgivings, I spent that afternoon moving from bar to bar, talking to those who had known Billy Purdue, who might have some idea of where he had gone. In some cases, the Portland PD had been there before me, which usually meant that my welcome was pretty frosty. No one could, or would, tell me anything, and I had almost given up hope when I found James Hamill.

  I guessed that there weren’t too many forks in Hamill’s family tree. He was a scrawny piece of lowlife, one hundred and twenty pounds of bitterness, repressed anger and redneck mentality, the kind of guy who wouldn’t willingly do someone a good turn if he could do a bad one instead. Hamill’s position was pretty low down on the food chain: where he existed, they ate it raw.

  He was playing alone in Old Port Billiards down on Fore Street when I came upon him, his baseball cap turned backwards on his head as he lined up a shot, his scrawny moustache curled in concentration. He missed the shot and swore loudly. If the ball had been iron and the pocket magnetised, he still would have missed the shot. Hamill was just that kind of guy.

  Someone in Gritty McDufFs had told me that Hamill hung out with Billy Purdue on occasion. I couldn’t imagine why. Maybe Billy just wanted to be with someone who could make him look good.

  ‘James Hamill?’ I asked.

  He scratched his ass and offered me his hand. His smile was a dentist’s nightmare.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, whoever you are. Now go fuck yourself.’

  He went back to his game.

  ‘I’m looking for Billy Purdue.’

  ‘Get in line.’

  ‘Someone else been asking after him?’

  ‘Just about anyone with a uniform and a badge, from what I hear. You a cop?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Private?’ He drew back his cue slowly, aiming to put a stripe in the centre pocket.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘You the one he hired?’

  I lifted the stripe and the cue ball went straight into the pocket.

  ‘Hey!’ said Hamill. ‘Gimme back my ball.’ He sounded like a small, spoiled child, although I figured you’d have a hard time getting any mother to claim Hamill as her own.

  ‘Billy Purdue hired a private investigator?’ I said.

  My tone betrayed me, for the look of profound unhappiness disappeared from Hamill’s face to be replaced by a greedy leer.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m interested in talking to anyone who can help me to trace Billy. Who’s the PI?’ If Hamill didn’t tell me, I could probably find out by calling around, assuming that whomever he had hired would admit to working for him.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to get my amigo into trouble,’ said Hamill, rubbing his chin with a rough approximation of a thoughtful expression. ‘What’s your angle?’

  ‘I worked for his ex-wife.’

  ‘She’s dead. Hope you got paid up front.’

  I hefted the pool ball in my hand and thought about letting fly at Hamill’s head. Hamill saw the intent in my face.

  ‘Look, I need some cash,’ he said, his manner softening. ‘Let me have something, I’ll give you his name.’

  I took out my wallet and put a twenty on the table.

  ‘Shit, twenty bucks,’ spat Hamill. ‘You’re a regular Jack Benny without the laughs. It’ll cost more than that.’

  ‘I’ll give you more. I want the name.’

  Hamill considered for a moment. ‘I don’t know his first name, but he’s called Wildon or Wifford or something.’

  ‘Willeford?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Willeford.’

  I nodded my thanks and moved off.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ shouted Hamill, and I could hear his sneakered feet shuffling across the floor behind me. ‘What about my extra?’

  I turned back. ‘Sorry, I almost forgot.’

  I put a dime on top of the twenty and gave him a wink as I returned the ball to the table.

  ‘That’s for the crack about his ex-wife. Enjoy it in good health.’

  I walked away and headed for the stairs.

  ‘Hey, Mr Trump,�
�� shouted Hamill at my retreating back. ‘You hurry back now, y’hear?’

  Marvin Willeford wasn’t in his office, a one-desk job above an Italian restaurant across from the blue Casco Bay ferry terminal, but a handwritten sign on the door said he had gone to lunch – a long lunch, obviously. I asked in the restaurant where Willeford usually hung out and the waiter gave me the name of a waterfront bar, the Sail Loft Tavern at Commercial and Silver.

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portland harbour was a thriving centre for fishing and shipping. In those days, the wharves would be piled high with lumber bound for Boston and the West Indies. There would be lumber on them again soon, but now that wood was bound for China and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the redevelopment of the harbour, the building of new condos and stores to attract the tourists and the young professionals, was still the subject of controversy. It’s hard to have a proper working harbour when folks in tie-dyes and sandals are hanging around taking pictures of one another and eating snow-cones. The Sail Loft looked like a throwback to the old days, the kind of place some people liked to call home.

  I knew Willeford to see but I had never spoken to him and knew almost nothing about his past. He looked older than I remembered when I found him at the dark bar, watching the rerun of a basketball game on TV surrounded by sea horses and starfish on the walls. I figured he must be in his early sixties by now, jowly and bald, with a few strands of white hair flicked across his skull like seaweed on a rock. His skin was pale, almost translucent, with a fine tracery of veins at his cheeks and a bulbous red nose pitted with craters, like a relief map of Mars. His features seemed misty and inexact, as if they were slowly dissolving into the alcohol that coursed through his system, gradually becoming blurred versions of their original form.

  He held a beer in one hand, an empty shot glass beside it, and the remains of a sandwich and potato chips lay on a plate before him as he watched the screen. He didn’t slouch at the bar, though; he sat tall and straight, leaning slightly into the rest at the back of the chair.

  ‘Hi,’ I said as I took a seat beside him. ‘Marvin Wille-ford?’

  ‘He owe you money?’ asked Willeford, without removing his gaze from the screen.

  ‘Not yet,’ I replied.

  ‘Good. You owe him money?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I repeated.

  ‘Pity. Still, I’d keep it that way if I were you.’ He turned himself towards me. ‘What can I do for you, son?’

  It felt odd to have someone call me ‘son’ at thirty-four. I almost felt compelled to show some ID. ‘My name’s Charlie Parker.’

  He nodded in recognition. ‘I knew your grandaddy, Bob Warren. He was a good man. Hear you may be moving in on my patch, Charlie Parker.’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. Hope there’ll be enough work for both of us. Buy you a beer?’

  He drained his glass and called for a refill. I ordered coffee.

  ‘“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,”’ said Willeford sadly.

  ‘Tennyson,’ I said.

  He smiled approvingly. ‘Nice to see there are still some romantics left.’ There was more to Willeford than long lunches in a dark bar. With his kind, there usually is.

  He smiled and saluted with his new beer. ‘Well at least you’re not a total philistine, son. Y’know, I’ve been coming to this place for too many years. I look around and wonder how long more it’ll be here, now that they’re building fancy apartments and cute little stores on the port. Sometimes I think I ought to chain myself to some railings in protest, ‘cept I got a bad hip and the cold makes me want to pee.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘So, what brings you to my office, son?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me about Billy Purdue.’

  He pursed his lips as he swallowed his beer. ‘This professional, or personal? ‘Cause if it’s personal, then we’re just talking, right? But if it’s professional, then you got your ethics, you got your client confidentiality, you got your poaching, although – and here I’m speaking personally, you understand – you want to take Billy Purdue as a client, then be my guest. He lacked some of the basic qualities I look for in a client, like money, though from what I hear he needs a lawyer more’n a PI.’

  ‘Let’s call it personal, then.’

  ‘Personal it is. He hired me to find his birth parents.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Month or so back. He paid me two-fifty up front – in ones and fives, straight out of the cookie jar – but then couldn’t pay anything more, so I dropped him. He wasn’t real pleased about it, but business is business. Anyway, that boy was more trouble than arthritis.’

  ‘How far did you get?’

  ‘Well, I took the usual steps. I applied to the state for non-identifying information – you know, ages of the parents, professions, birth states, ethnicity. Got zilch, nada. The kid was found under a cabbage leaf.’

  ‘No birth records at all?’

  He held up his hands in mock amazement, then took another huge mouthful of beer. I reckoned it took him three mouthfuls to a glass. I was right.

  ‘Well, I headed up to Dark Hollow. You know where that is, up north past Greenville?’ I nodded. ‘I had some other business up by Moosehead, figured I’d do Purdue a favour and carry on some of his work on my other client’s time. The last guy who fostered him lives up thataways, though he’s an old man now, older than me. His name’s Payne, Meade Payne. He told me that, far as he knew, Billy Purdue’s was originally a private adoption arranged through some woman in Bangor and the sisters at St Martha’s.’

  St Martha’s rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why. Willeford seemed to sense my struggle. ‘St Martha’s,’ he repeated. ‘Where that old lady killed herself few days back, the one who ran away. St Martha’s used to be a convent and the nuns took in women who had, you know, fallen by the wayside. Except now all the nuns are dead, or Alzheimered out, and St Martha’s is a private nursing home, strictly low end. Place smells of pee and boiled vegetables.’

  ‘So no records?’

  ‘Nothing. I looked through whatever files remained, which wasn’t a whole lot. They kept a record of the births and retained copies of the relevant documents, but there was nothing that matched Billy Purdue. It didn’t go through the books or, if it did, then somebody made sure to hide the traces. No one seemed to know why.’

  ‘You talk to this woman, the one who arranged the adoption?’

  ‘Lansing. Cheryl Lansing. Yeah, I spoke to her. She’s old too. Jeez, even her kids were getting old. All I seem to meet is old people – old people and clients. I think I need to make some young friends.’

  ‘People will talk,’ I said. ‘You’ll get a reputation.’

  He laughed to himself. ‘Can you be a sugar daddy without having any cash?’

  ‘I don’t know. You could try, but I don’t think you’d get very far.’

  He nodded and finished his beer. ‘Story of my life. Dead folks get more action than I ever did.’

  So Cheryl Lansing was the woman who had arranged Billy Purdue’s adoption. She obviously had more than a professional interest in him, if she was still trying to help out his ex-wife and his son three decades later. I pictured the bag of clothes, and the box of food, and the small wad of bills in Rita Ferris’s hand. Cheryl Lansing had seemed like a nice woman. The news of the two deaths would hit her hard, I thought.

  I called for another beer and Willeford thanked me. He was pretty stewed by now. I felt like a great guy, getting him so drunk that he wouldn’t be able to work for the rest of the day just so I could satisfy my crusading urge.

  ‘What about Cheryl Lansing?’ I pressed.

  ‘Well, she didn’t want to talk about Purdue. I kept at her but it was no use. All she would say was that the woman was from up north, that she arranged the adoption as a favour to the sisters, that she didn’t even know the woman’s name. Apparently, she made some money brokering adoptions for the nuns and passed on a portion of the proceeds to them, except this
one was pro bono. She had a copy of a birth certificate, though, but the parents were John and Jane Doe. I figured there had to be a record of the birth somewhere.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, through what Payne could tell me and by checking the records, I found that most of the people who fostered Billy Purdue also came from up north. Farthest south he got was Bangor, until he left for Boston when he was old enough. So I asked questions, put up notices with approximate dates of birth, even took out an advertisement in some of the local papers, then sat around and waited. Anyway, the money had run out by then and I didn’t see as how Purdue would be able to come up with any more.

  ‘Then I got a call, saying I should talk to a woman in the old folks’ home up in Dark Hollow, which brought the focus back to St Martha’s.’ He paused and took a long slug of beer. ‘Well, I told Billy that I might have something and asked him if he wanted me to continue. He told me he had no more money, so I told him that, regretfully, I would have to cease our business relationship. Then he chewed me out some, threatened to smash up my office if I didn’t help him out. I showed him this –’ He pushed back his jacket to reveal a Colt Python with a long, eight-inch barrel. It made him look like an aging gunfighter. ‘And he went on his way.’

  ‘Did you give him the name of the woman?’

  ‘I would have given him the coat off my back to get rid of him. I figured it was time to beat a strategic retreat. If I’d retreated any faster, I’d have been going forward again.’

  My coffee was cold in the mug before me. I leaned over the bar and poured it into a sink.

  ‘Any idea where Billy might be now?’

  Willeford shook his head. ‘There is one more thing,’ he said.

  I waited.

  ‘The woman in St Martha’s? Her name was Miss Emily Watts or, least, that’s what she called herself. That name ring a bell with you?’

  I thought for a while but came up with nothing. ‘I don’t think so. Should it?’

  ‘She’s the old lady who died in the snow. Strange stuff, don’t you think?’