Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  “Did she send you out to frighten me?” I asked.

  He had the decency to look embarrassed.

  “We just don’t want any trouble. I don’t want any trouble.”

  I sized him up. A man who says he doesn’t want trouble has usually experienced trouble before, and has a pretty good expectation of experiencing it again. If Ray Czabo had done something wrong, then I could just be the first of any number of people who might come knocking on his wife’s door, the cops among them.

  “You got a name?” I said.

  “Tillman,” he said. “Casey Tillman.”

  “Anything to Gunnar Tillman?”

  He nodded. “He’s my old man.”

  “I thought I saw a resemblance.”

  Gunnar Tillman was bad news, the kind of minor-league hood that places like Bangor threw up occasionally like a piece of rotten fish. He was involved in drugs, prostitution, and maybe a little smuggling of immigrants across the Canadian border, if the stories were to be believed. I could understand now why his son didn’t want the cops sniffing around his affairs.

  “You see much of him?” I asked.

  “As little as I can.”

  I didn’t know if that was true. From what I’d heard of Gunnar Tillman, he made the decisions on the extent of his involvement in people’s lives. It seemed unlikely that he’d accept any form of rejection from his own son.

  I handed Casey Tillman my card.

  “You think of anything, or if you hear from Ray, let me know. I wasn’t lying to you: Ray’s not in any trouble that I know of, but I do need to talk to him. If you’re being straight with me, then I won’t say anything about you to the cops unless circumstances change and there’s no way to avoid it.”

  Tillman slipped the card into a pocket of his jeans.

  “Nice car,” he said, pointing with his chin at my Mustang. “I run an auto shop in Orono. You ever need some work done, you give me a call. It’s under my name in the book.”

  With that, he turned and walked back to the house. Edna Czabo met him at the door. I wondered if we should have staged a fight, just for appearances’ sake. I settled for trying to look shaken. She seemed happy with that, but shot me another orally suggestive gesture before she slammed the door, just in case I’d forgotten my place.

  I got Ray Czabo’s new address from a detective named Jeff Weis over in the Bangor PD. Ray had a habit of leaving his business cards around in the hope that someone might give him a call if something juicy came up. They rarely did, as most Maine cops regarded Voodoo Ray as low enough to ride a rat, but you had to admire his capacity for optimism. Since his separation, he had been living in a first-floor apartment over by the Bangor municipal golf course. It was the kind of place where kids rode bicycles down the hallways and there was a constant smell of burnt fat in the air. There was no reply when I rang his doorbell, so I headed around to the front of the building and peered in through his window. I saw a TV, some true-crime magazines on a coffee table, and stacks of cardboard boxes filled with files. Some of the top boxes had been overturned, and their contents left on the floor. That wasn’t like Ray Czabo. He was a meticulous man. I knew that from my own personal encounter with him, when I had forced him to hand over the souvenir he had taken from my house, his nose still bleeding upon the floor. There had been nothing out of place in his office then. Everything was clean and dusted.

  The top window was open to allow a little air in. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then slipped on my gloves and hoisted myself up onto the sill. I reached in to open the latch on the main window, then entered Voodoo Ray’s apartment. It was cold inside. The bed in the apartment’s sole bedroom was neatly made, and the kitchen was tidy apart from a cup soaking in the sink. The dishcloth on the rack was bone dry, and so was the towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Maybe Ray didn’t take a lot of showers, or maybe he hadn’t been home in a while.

  I examined the papers on the floor. They were mostly reports of serious crimes clipped from newspapers and magazines, some of them with handwritten pages of notes appended by Ray. One or two of the cases were familiar to me. Most, being out of state, were not. Apart from the disordered files, there was nothing suspicious about Ray’s apartment. I closed the window and went to the front door to let myself out. My foot hit something light, which spun across the carpet and bounced against the wall.

  I picked up the black plastic case from the floor. It was an empty film canister.

  Papers spilled on the floor, and a film canister by the door: they were small things, and could be dismissed as the carelessness of a man in a hurry. If it was Ray’s doing, then I wondered why he had been in such a rush to leave, and if the photographs he had taken included one of a little girl with a baseball bat in her hand. I hadn’t seen any developing equipment in Ray’s closet, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t responsible for the picture. The other possibility was that someone had searched Ray’s house before me, and that among the items that person had removed was at least one roll of film.

  I left the apartment, closing the door gently behind me, then stuck my card underneath it in case Ray came back. I still had questions I wanted to ask him about the Grady house. As I stood, the door across from Ray’s opened and an elderly man in a clean blue shirt peered out from across a security chain.

  “I’ll call the police,” he said.

  “Why?” I said.

  He squinted at me.

  “You shouldn’t be in there. That’s Mr. Czabo’s apartment.”

  I had to admire the old guy. There were few neighbors in this kind of place with the courage to stand up for those around them.

  I showed him my ID.

  “I’m a private investigator. I got no reply from inside, so I thought I’d leave my card for Ray.”

  The old man gestured with his hand. I handed him my wallet. He looked at it for a time, pursed his lips while he considered its authenticity, then handed it back to me.

  “I guess you’re straight,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Have you seen Mr. Czabo around lately?”

  The old guy shook his head.

  “Not for a while. Last time I saw him, it was when he had the trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Two men came. A little fella and a big fella. The little fella was older, but younger than me. They shouted some at Mr. Czabo, then went outside and kicked in the side of his car. I was going to call the police then as well, but Mr. Czabo told me not to. He said it was a misunderstanding.”

  “When was this?”

  “A while back. Could have been three weeks, maybe more.”

  “Do you remember anything else about the men involved?”

  “The older one was small, with white curly hair and too many gold chains for a man his age. The other one was just huge. No neck. Looked like a throwback to the cavemen.”

  The older man sounded like Gunnar Tillman. I figured his companion for the hired help.

  I thanked Voodoo Ray’s neighbor again.

  “Well,” he said, as his door began to close, “I give a damn. This place will go to shit if people don’t look out for each other.”

  “You’re a dying breed,” I said.

  “Maybe, but I’m not dead yet,” he replied, and then he closed the door.

  A few minutes from Ray’s place was a strip mall, anchored by a large drugstore. It was a slim chance, but I pulled into the lot and parked outside the store. The photo desk was beside the registers, staffed by a bored-looking teenager in a bright yellow polo shirt.

  “Hi,” I said. “I think my wife left some photos in here maybe a week ago. We can’t find the receipt, but we’d really like our pictures.”

  “You sure she left them in here?”

  I did my best impression of a frustrated husband.

  “She thinks this is where she left them to be developed. She’s distracted at the moment. We’re expecting our first baby.”

  I wasn’t sure which wa
s worse: lying or embellishing the lie with the truth. The photo guy didn’t seem to care much either way.

  “What’s the name?” he said.

  “Czabo.”

  He flicked wearily through the envelopes behind the counter. About halfway through, he stopped and removed two of them from the cabinet.

  “Czabo,” he said. “Two rolls.”

  He didn’t ask for ID. I thanked him and paid for the pictures, then walked out of the store feeling like a spy.

  I opened the envelopes in the car. One batch of photographs contained pictures of Ray’s buddies in a bar, a couple of empty landscapes that might have been a crime scene or an attempt by Ray to get in touch with nature, and two photos of some damage to the wing of a green car that was probably Ray’s. I guessed it was the result of Gunnar and his goon kicking in the wing. The damage didn’t look too serious, and the pictures were probably for insurance purposes.

  The second set of photographs began with five scenes of Ray’s house, the one currently occupied by his wife and her toy boy. Casey Tillman was in each of the pictures, mostly getting into or out of his car, or greeting Edna Czabo with a kiss and an embrace. It looked like Ray wasn’t as happy about staying out of his wife’s affairs as she appeared to be about staying out of his.

  Casey was also in two more photographs, this time taken outside the garage that bore his name. There were two other men in the pictures with him. One looked like the Missing Link, assuming the Missing Link had learned to tie its own shoelaces. The other was Gunnar Tillman. He was much smaller than his son, and any weight he was carrying was still more muscle than fat. His hair was white and curly, and contrasted nicely with his winter tan. He was wearing a golf sweater and shiny sweat pants. Gold jewelry glittered in the sunlight at his wrist and around his neck. Gunnar Tillman clearly shopped at Hoods-R-Us.

  It wasn’t a good idea for Ray Czabo to be shooting clandestine photographs of Tillman, but maybe he hoped to win back his wife by showing her that her lover hadn’t entirely cut off relations with his criminal father. Somehow I felt Ray was clutching at straws. Edna Czabo had a new man in her life, one that was a lot younger than the old one, and with a little grit to him. Since she wasn’t running for the presidency, or leading her local Girl Scout troop, I didn’t think she would be too concerned about him meeting up with his old man occasionally.

  The last photographs were all images of the Grady house, taken from every possible angle short of dangling upside down from the drainpipe. According to the digital date imprinted in the right-hand corner of the frames, they were all shot a couple of weeks before, in the space of about fifteen minutes. Ray had even managed to photograph the interior of the house through cracks in the window boards. I quickly flicked through them once, and saw nothing to make them stand out in any way. I went through them again, this time more slowly, and found a detail in the second-to-last photo that made me pause.

  It was the photograph Ray had taken by pressing the camera to the boards. Most of the image was obscured by the reflection of the flash on the glass, but the left-hand side was relatively clear. It showed the mirror on the wall of the reception room, the same mirror that I had seen when I first entered the house.

  Reflected in the glass was the shape of a man. I could just make out his back, which was clothed in a dark jacket, but his face was not visible. His reflection was turned away from the camera. I flicked back through the images one more time, to confirm what I had seen, then laid them to one side.

  In Ray Czabo’s photographs, all the doors and windows in the Grady house were clearly padlocked from the outside. There was no way that anyone could be inside.

  Yet someone was.

  That night Rachel complained of pains in her stomach, so I took her to Maine Medical and spent two hours in the waiting room while the doctors looked her over. I read the newspapers for a time, but they seemed to be filled with suffering and I didn’t need to read about people dying while Rachel was in pain.

  Eventually, the doctors let her out. They told us that there was nothing to be concerned about, and that everything looked fine. We got home at about 2 A.M., and Rachel began crying shortly after. I couldn’t console her, and she couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak, so I held her in my arms until her crying stopped and she at last fell asleep, her final moments of wakefulness punctuated by small hiccuping sobs.

  The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened, and I didn’t know what else to do except to let her be.

  VII

  They arrived at the Portland airport shortly after 10 A.M. Its official title was the Portland International Jetport, which had a kind of Buck Rogers ring to it, although futurism and Portland weren’t concepts that sat easily together. I kind of liked it that way.

  They were getting older, I realized. We all were. True, the changes in Angel, the new pain lines in his face and the creeping gray in his previously soot-black hair, were too sudden to go unnoticed, but his partner was also graying slightly. Louis’s satanic beard was slowly speckling with white, and there was now also a considerable dusting of it in his hair. He caught me looking at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re going seriously gray,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hate to break it to you.”

  “Like I said, I believe you’re mistaken.”

  “You can take steps. You don’t have to just sit back and let it happen.”

  “I don’t have to sit back and do nothin’, because there’s nothin’ to let happen.”

  “Okay, if you say so. But you know, you let that hair grow out some and you can sign on as Morgan Freeman’s stunt double.”

  “He has a point,” chipped in Angel. “Morgan ain’t as young as he used to be. Studios would probably pay good money for a younger guy who just looks as old as Morgan Freeman.”

  Louis stopped at the door leading out of the terminal building.

  “You going to sulk?” I asked him.

  “Maybe he’s just forgotten where he’s going. That happens as you get—”

  For an older man, Angel could still move pretty quickly when he wanted to, so Louis’s Cole Haan missed him by an inch.

  The first time.

  We sat at a table in the Bayou Kitchen, a tiny little diner over on Deering that until recently had only opened for lunch but now did weekend dinners as well. It could seat maybe twenty people, and its counter was piled high with sauces that carried warnings advising that they shouldn’t be used by pregnant women or people with heart complaints. The food was good, and in winter it was mainly locals who went there.

  Angel was still rubbing his shin occasionally and casting hurt glances at Louis, so it was left to me to do most of the talking. I told them a little more of the history of the Grady house, and about my encounters with Chief Grass, Denny Maguire, and Gunnar Tillman’s boy, among others.

  “You sure Maguire’s clean?” asked Louis.

  “I didn’t get anything bad from him.”

  “You tell Matheson about him?”

  “No.”

  I had spoken with Matheson that morning. He told me that he had a key for the basement in the house, and he thought that the cops had one too, but he hadn’t realized that there was no copy on the set of keys he had given to me. He promised to get one to me by the end of the day. He also told me that he’d had a shouting match with Chief Grass after Grass had questioned the wisdom of hiring me.

  “Matheson is edgy enough as it is,” I said. “The last thing I need is for him to start bothering Maguire about the past.”

  “What about Czabo?”

  “I’d call him a suspect, but there hasn’t been a crime. Still, the photo in the mailbox isn’t his style. He’s a watcher, not a doer.”

  “And the antiques guy?”

  “The Collector?” I had begun to think of him by that name. After all, I had no other. “He told me he had nothing to do with the photograph. He said he just wanted a mirror from the h
ouse, but he knows something.”

  “Could be he’s a grave robber, like Voodoo Ray,” said Angel.

  “Maybe if you just gave him a mirror, he’d tell you what he knows,” suggested Louis.

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, nothing in the house is mine to give away.”

  “You think he’s a threat?”

  I put my hands up in the air.

  “A threat to what? To us? We haven’t done anything. For once, we’re free and clear. Nobody hates us on this case.”

  “Yet,” said Angel.

  “Always happens, though,” said Louis.

  “If only they took the time to get to know us a little better,” said Angel.

  “I’ve taken the time to get to know you a little better,” I said, “and look where it got me. You’re on the payroll, by the way, so it’s not a charity case. Matheson signed off on the surveillance.”

  Louis finished off his jambalaya, soaking up the last of the sauce and rice with some fresh bread.

  “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes, was what he said. I told him we’d give it a week, then review our options.”

  “Sounds like it could be nothing,” said Louis. “A photograph in a mailbox, that’s all you got?”

  “That’s all.”

  I reached into my pocket and removed a copy of the Matheson picture. I carefully unfolded it, then pushed it slowly across the table.

  “But do you want to take the chance?”

  The two men looked at the image of the young girl. Angel answered for both of them.

  “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

  Later that afternoon they stopped by the house to say hi to Rachel. She was a little distant, but neither of them remarked upon it. I thought that she was just tired after the night before, but it was the first sign of troubles to come. The pain and danger that she had endured by remaining with me, and the fears that she felt for herself and our child, seemed to her to be rendered more acute by the presence of two men who were friends yet who always carried with them a potential for violence. They reminded her of what had befallen her in the past, and what might befall the child she carried. Looking back, perhaps they also caused her to reflect on my own capacities, and the possibility that I might always draw violent men to me. She had attempted to explain these things to me before, and I had tried to reassure her as best I could. I hoped that, in time, her worries would fade. I think she hoped so too, even though she feared that they would not. I wanted to ask her again about the visit to the hospital, and the tears that followed, but there was no time. Instead, I held her and told her I’d be home before midnight, and she squeezed me and said that would be fine.