CHAPTER FOUR
I MET ANGEL AND Louis for dinner that night at the Wildwood BBQ on Park Avenue South, not far from Union Square. It was tough to make the call between Wildwood and Blue Smoke up on Twenty-seventh, but novelty won out; novelty, and, for Louis, the prospect of beans that had pieces of steak added to them. When it came to rib joints, Louis liked extra meat with everything, probably including the Jell-O. If he was going to die of a coronary, he was going to do it in style.
These two men, both of whom had killed, yet only one of whom, Louis, could truly be called a natural killer, were now my closest friends. I hadn’t seen them since late the previous year, when they had managed to get themselves into some trouble in upstate New York and I’d followed their tracks to see if I could help. It hadn’t ended well, and we’d kept some distance from one another since then; not due to any ill will, but because Louis was concerned about the possible fallout from what had occurred, and didn’t want to see me contaminated by association. Now, though, he appeared content, or as content as Louis ever seemed to be, figuring that the worst was over. In truth, it was hard to tell. After all, it wasn’t that when Louis laughed, the world laughed with him. Instead, when Louis laughed, the world tended to look around to see who had fallen over and impaled himself on a spike.
It was always an entertaining spectacle, seeing Angel and Louis eat ribs, in part because some kind of role reversal seemed to occur. Louis—tall, black, and dressed like a showroom dummy that has suddenly decided to take flight and seek better accommodations elsewhere—ate ribs in the manner of a man who fears that his plate could be whisked away at any second, and he should therefore consume as much as possible as quickly as possible. Angel, on the other hand, who was small and white (or, as he liked to put it, “whiteish”), and who not only always looked like he’d slept in his clothes but looked like other people might have slept in them too, nibbled his food in an almost delicate manner, the way a small bird might if it could hold a short rib in its claws. They were drinking ale. I was sipping a glass of red wine.
“Red wine,” said Angel. “In a rib joint. You know, we’re gay, and even we don’t drink wine in a rib joint.”
“Then I guess if I were gay, I’d just be a more sophisticated homosexual than you. In fact, regardless of my sexuality, I’m still more sophisticated than you.”
“You not eating?” asked Lis bird e souis, pointing with the end of a mostly demolished rib at the small pile of bare bones on my plate.
“I’m not so hungry,” I said. “Anyway, after watching you two, I’m considering vegetarianism, or just never eating again. At least, not in public, and certainly not with you.”
“What the hell is wrong with us?” Angel sounded spectacularly aggrieved.
“You eat like an old lady. He eats like they just thawed him out next to a mammoth.”
“You want us to use a knife and fork?”
“Do you know how to use a knife and fork?”
“Don’t tempt me, Miss Manners. The knives are sharp here.”
Louis finished his final rib, wiped his face with his napkin, and sat back with a sigh. If his heart could have sighed with relief, it would have echoed him.
“Glad I wore my buffet pants tonight,” he said.
“Me too,” I said. “You’d worn your regular pants, one of your buttons would have taken someone’s eye out by now.”
He arched an eyebrow at me, and waited.
“Sorry,” I said. “You continue to be boyishly slim.”
Angel signaled the server for another beer before speaking.
“You want to tell us about it?” he said.
But they knew most of it already. I had lost my Maine private investigator’s license, and my lawyer, Aimee Price, was still fighting to have it restored to me, hampered at every turn by the objections of the state police and, it appeared, a detective named Hansen in particular. From what Aimee could establish, the order to revoke my license had come from high up, and Hansen was just the messenger. A court challenge was still an option, but Aimee wasn’t sure that it would be useful. The state police were the final arbiters when it came to licensing, and any court in Maine would probably be guided by their decision.
My firearms permit had also been revoked, although the precise nature of the revocation was still unclear to me and to my lawyer. I had initially been ordered to hand over every gun in my possession pending what was vaguely termed “an inquiry,” and was told that it would be only a temporary matter.
I had surrendered my licensed firearms (and hidden the unlicensed ones, after an anonymous tip that the cops were coming with a warrant), which had subsequently been returned to me when it became apparent that the surrender notice was of dubious legality, and possibly in breach of the Second Amendment. Less open to argument was the decision to rescind my permit to carry a concealed weapon in the state of Maine, on the grounds that my previous actions had revealed me as an “unsafe” person. Aimee was working on that one too, but so far a brick wall would have been more yielding than the state police. I was being punished, but just how long that punishment would continue remained to be seen.
Now I was working as bar manager at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, which wasn’t bad work and usually only took up four days each week, but it wasn’t what I was good at. It didn’t seem as though there was a great deal of sympa by?eal of sythy for my plight in the local law enforcement community. I couldn’t recall how I’d made so many enemies until Aimee took the trouble to explain exactly how I’d managed it, and then it had all become a little clearer to me.
Strangely, I didn’t care about what had occurred as much as Hansen and his superiors might have thought. It had dented my pride, and my lawyer was fighting in my name partly on principle and mostly because I didn’t want Hansen and those above him to think that I would just roll over and die on their say-so, but in a sense I was almost satisfied that I couldn’t practice as a PI. It left me free, relieving me of the obligation to help others. If I were to take on a case, however informally, it would probably land me in jail. The state police’s actions had given me permission to be selfish, and to pursue my own aims. It had taken me some months to decide that that was what I was going to do.
Despite what the old man, Durand, might have thought earlier that day, I hadn’t chosen lightly to delve into my past and to question the circumstances of my father’s death. A man, a foul man who used the name Kushiel but was better known as the Collector, had whispered to me that my family had secrets, that my blood group could not have been the result of my assumed parentage. For a time, I tried to hide from myself what he had said. I did not want to believe it. I think that I took the job in the bar in part as a form of escape. I replaced my obligations to clients with my obligations to Dave Evans, one of the owners of the Bear, and the man who had offered me the job. But as time passed, and winter came again, I made a decision.
Because the Collector had not been lying, not entirely. The blood groups did not match.
When the new year dawned, I started asking questions. I began trying to contact those who had known my father, and especially the cops who had worked alongside him. Some were dead. Others had fallen off the radar after retirement, as sometimes happens with those who have served their time and desire only to collect their pensions and walk away from it all. But I knew the names of the two men to whom my father had been particularly close, beat cops who had graduated from the academy alongside him: Eddie Grace, who was a couple of years older than my father; and Jimmy Gallagher, my father’s old partner and closest friend. My mother had sometimes referred semifondly to my father and Jimmy as the “Birthday Boys,” a reference to their twice yearly nights on the town. Those were the only times when my father would stay out all night, eventually reappearing shortly before noon the following day, when he would return quietly, almost apologetically, slightly the worse for wear but never sick or stumbling, and sleep until the evening. My mother never commented on it. It was an indulgence that she permitted him, and he was a man of few indulgences, or so it seemed to me.
And then there was Jimmy Gallagher himself. I hadn’t seen him since shortly after the funeral, when he had come to the house to ask how my mother and I were doing, and she had told him that she intended to leave Pearl River and return to Maine. My mother had sent me to bed, but what teenager would not have listened at the top of the stairs, seeking some of the information that he was certain was being withheld from him. And I heard my mother say: “How much did you know, Jimmy?”
“About what?”
“About all of it: the girl, the people who came. How much did you know?”
ldqurad?h="5%"lo;I knew about the girl. The others…”
I could almost see him shrugging.
“Will said they were the same people.”
Jimmy did not answer for a time. Then: “That’s not possible. You know that it’s not. I killed one of them, and the other died months before. The dead don’t return, not like that.”
“He whispered it to me, Jimmy.” The tears were being held back, but only barely. “It was one of the last things he said to me. He said it was them.”
“He was frightened, Elaine, frightened for you and the boy.”
“But he killed them, Jimmy. He killed them, and they weren’t even armed.”
“I don’t know why—”
“I know why: he wanted to stop them. He knew that they would come back in the end. They wouldn’t need guns. They’d use their bare hands if they had to. Maybe—”
“What?”
“Maybe they’d even have preferred it that way,” she concluded.
Now she began to cry. I heard Jimmy stand, and I knew that he was putting his arms around her, consoling her.
“We’ll never know for sure. This I do know: he loved you. He loved you both, and he was sorry for all that he did to hurt you. I think he spent those years trying to make it up to you, but he never could. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t forgive himself, that’s all. He just couldn’t do it…”
My mother’s sobbing increased in intensity, and I turned away and went as quietly as I could to my room, where I watched the moon from my window and stared out at Franklin Avenue, and the paths that my father would never walk again.