I worked that night. I was not scheduled to do so, but Al and Lorraine, two of the regular bartenders who had been living together for almost as long as they had been working at the Bear, were involved in a collision on Route 1 not far from Scarborough Downs, and both were taken to the hospital as a precaution. With nobody to cover for them, it meant that I had to spend another night behind the bar. I was still tired from the night before, but there was nothing to be done except to J ona p keep going. I figured that I could probably get an extra day in comp time from Dave, which would give me a little more time to spend in New York the following week, but for now it was just me and Gary and Dave, serving up beers and burgers and trying to keep our heads above water.
Mickey Wallace had planned to talk to Parker again at the Bear that day, but an incident in the motel parking lot early in the afternoon had caused him to reconsider. A man who had been sitting at the bar earlier in the week, the one who had been flirting with the little redhead, was waiting beside Mickey’s car when he went outside shortly after 3 P.M., both car and man barely visible in the thickening fog. The man, who didn’t introduce himself but who Mickey remembered was called Jackie, hadn’t said much, but he’d made it clear to Mickey that he didn’t approve of him bothering Parker, and if Mickey continued to do so, he threatened to acquaint him with two gentlemen who were both bigger and less reasonable than he, Jackie, was, and who would fold Mickey into a packing crate, breaking limbs if they had to in order to make him fit, and then mail him to the darkest hole in Africa by the slowest and most circuitous route possible. When Mickey asked Jackie if Parker had put him up to this, Jackie had replied in the negative, but Mickey wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. It didn’t matter, in the end. Mickey wasn’t above playing dirty himself. He called the Bear to make sure that Parker was still working, and when he was asked if he wanted to talk to him, Mickey said that it was okay, he’d drop by and see him in person.
As darkness settled on the city, and while the mist was still heavy on the land, Mickey drove out to Scarborough.
It was past 8 P.M. as Mickey moved through the fog toward the house on the hill. He knew that Parker would not return until one or two in the morning, and the house next door was dark. An old couple, the Johnsons, lived there, but they seemed to be away. What was it that they called people who left for Florida when the cold began to bite? Birds? No, “snowbirds,” that was it.
Even if they were home, it wouldn’t have deterred him from what he was planning to do. It would just have meant a longer walk. With them gone, he could park his car close to the house and not have to get his feet cold and wet, or risk being asked by a curious cop what he happened to be doing walking down a marsh road in the winter darkness.
He had already driven by the subject’s house a couple of times in daylight, but he couldn’t take the chance of looking at it up close without the risk of being seen. Now that he wasn’t working as a PI any longer, Parker spent more of his time at home, but Mickey hadn’t been allowed the luxury of watching the house for long enough to establish his routines. That would come, in time.
Mickey still entertained the possibility that he could wear down Parker’s defenses and receive at least a modicum of cooperation from him. Mickey was tenacious, in a quiet way. He knew that most people wanted to talk about their lives, even if they didn’t always realize it themselves. They wanted a sympathetic ear, someone who would listen, who would understand. Sometimes all it took was a cup of coffee, but he’d seen it take a bottle of Chivas too. They were the two extremes, and the rest of humanity, in Mickey’s experience, slotted into various points between.
Mickey Wallace had been a good reporter. He was genuinely interested in those whose stories he wrote. He didn’t have to fake it. Human beings were just endlessly fascinating to him, and even the dullest had a story worth telling, however short, buried somewhere deep inside. But, in time, journalism began to weary and frustrate him. He didn’t have the energy for it that he had once enjoyed, or the hunger to go chasing people day after day just for the stories that he uncovered to be forgotten before the weekend. He wanted to write something that would last. He thought about writing novels, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t read them, so why would he want to write them? Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
No, what interested Mickey was good and evil. It always had, ever since he was a kid watching The Lone Ranger and The Virginian on TV. Even as a reporter, it was the crime stories to which he was most drawn. True, they were more likely to appear above the fold, and Mickey liked seeing his name as close to the masthead as possible, but he was also fascinated by the relationship between killers and their victims. There was an intimacy, a bond between a murderer and a victim. It seemed to Mickey that a little of the victim’s identity was transferred to the killer, passed on at the moment of death, retained deep within his soul. He also believed, somewhat more controversially, that, in a sense, the victims’ deaths were ultimately what gave meaning to their lives, what defined them, what raised them from the anonymity of day-to-day ordinariness and bequeathed a kind of immortality on them, or as close to immortality as the temporary nature of public attention could allow. Mickey supposed that it wasn’t quite immortality after all, especially since the victims in question were dead, but it would do until he could think of a better word.
It was as a reporter that he had first come into indirect contact with the subject, Parker. He had been among the throng outside the little house in Brooklyn on the night that Parker’s wife and child were killed. He had reported on the case, the stories getting smaller and smaller, and falling deeper and deeper into the main body of the paper, as lead after lead dried up. Eventually, even Mickey gave up on the Parker killings, and put them on the back burner for a time. He had heard rumors that the feds were looking at a possible serial-killer connection, but the price of that information was a promise that he would sit on it until the time was right.
While Mickey was genuinely interested in human beings and their stories, he also acknowledged to himself a kind of numbness of the heart that afflicted many in his trade. He was curious about people, but he did not care about them, or not enough to feel their pain as his own. He sympathized with them, a temporary, shallow emotion, but he did not empathize. Perhaps it was a consequence of his work, of being forced to deal with story after story in close succession, the depth and duration of his involvement dependent entirely on the public’s appetite and, by extension, his newspaper’s. That was, in part, why he had decided to leave the world of journalism behind, and devote himself to books. By immersing himself in only a handful of cases, he hoped to sensitize himself anew. That, and make a little money along the way. He just needed to find the right story to tell, and he was convinced that, in Charlie Parker, he had found that story.
Mickey could recall the moment when he had become convinced that there was something different about the man. He hadn’t faded away after the deaths of his family. Neither had he gone on daytime shows to talk about his pain, in an effort to keep t Jplethehe killings in the public eye and ensure that the pressure on the law enforcement community to track down their killer remained constant. No, he had picked up a PI’s license, and then he had gone hunting, both for the killer, the one who would come to be called the Traveling Man, and for others. The first one he found was the Modine woman, and that was when the bells started ringing for Mickey. That was a story in itself right there, worthy of a Sunday supplement: father loses his wife and child to a killer, then hunts down a pair of child killers in turn. It had everything that a jaded public could desire.
Except Parker wouldn’t tell it. Requests for interviews were politely, and sometimes impolitely, declined. Then—bang!—there he was again, and this time it was the big one he was trying to hook, the Traveling Man. Over the years that followed, it became clear to Mickey, and to others like him, that there was something strange going on here, something quite exceptional. This man had a gift of sorts, although it wasn’t a gift that anybody in his right mind would wish to have: it seemed that he was drawn to evil, and evil, in turn, was drawn to him. And when he found it, he destroyed it. It was as simple, or as complex, as that, depending upon how you chose to view it, because Mickey Wallace was not dumb, and he knew that a man couldn’t do what Parker had done and not suffer serious damage along the way. Now here he was, working in a bar in a northeastern city, separated from his girlfriend, seeing the child he’d had with her maybe once or twice each month, and living alone in the big house upon which Mickey was now carefully shining his flashlight.
Mickey wanted to go inside. He wanted to poke around in desk drawers, to open files in cabinets and on computers, to see where the subject ate, sat, slept. He wanted to walk in his footsteps, because what Mickey proposed to do was to give Parker a voice, to take his words, his experiences, and improve upon them, creating a new version of him that was somehow greater than the sum of his parts. To do that, Mickey needed to become him for a time, to understand the reality of his existence.
And if Parker ultimately decided not to cooperate? Mickey was trying not to think about that. He had spoken to his publisher that morning, and the publisher had made clear his preference for Parker being involved with the project. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it would affect the number of copies that would be printed, and the nature of the publicity for the book. His view was understandable, but it would make Mickey’s task more difficult. Anyone could put together a cut-and-paste job, although not as good a cut-and-paste job as Mickey could, but that wasn’t what the big bucks would be paid for. It wasn’t just about the money, either: there was a real story to be told here, something deep and peculiar and unsettling, and the words had to come from the subject’s own mouth. Mickey would wear him down, of that he was certain, or reasonably certain. In the meantime, he had begun making contact with other prospective interviewees in the hope of establishing a more detailed background dossier about the subject, because Mickey wanted to know more about Parker than Parker did about himself.
Except, the people who were close to him were also loyal to him, and so far all Mickey had to show for his efforts was, for the most part, a series of rebuffs. True, he had sessions lined up, both on and off the record, with a couple of ex-cops who remembered Parker from New York, and a former captain from Internal Affairs who, Mickey was reliably informed, believed that the subject should be behind bars; the subject and his buddies. They interested Mickey too. All he knew about them were their names: Angel and Louis. J ju wa The captain said that he could help him with them too, just not as much. He was only willing to talk off the record, but he had promised Mickey copies of investigation reports, and some juice that a good reporter like he was would easily be able to corroborate. It was a start, but Mickey wanted more.
His clothes felt damp. The mist was a blessing in that it concealed him from any casual observer passing on the road below, and even someone coming up the drive would struggle to see his car, or him, until they reached the house itself. In fact, Mickey had parked the car beneath a copse of trees, and unless somebody was actively looking for it, he was pretty certain that it would pass unnoticed. Even if Parker returned unexpectedly, Mickey was convinced that he would drive right by it. But the mist was also cold and wet, and so thick that Mickey felt he might almost clasp a clump of it in his hand if he tried, like cotton candy.
In the pocket of his coat he had a set of lock picks.
He climbed up to the porch of the house and, more out of hope than expectation, tried the door. It was locked. He thought for a moment, then gave the door a hard push with his shoulder, rattling it in its frame. No alarm went off. Good, thought Mickey. Another lucky break to add to the absent neighbors and the fact that Parker no longer seemed to have a dog. He’d heard him talking about it with one of the bartenders, shortly before Parker gave him the bum’s rush.
He moved to the left and peered in the window. There was a night-light burning in the kitchen at the back of the house that shed a little illumination into the living room. The rooms looked comfortably furnished, with a lot of books. To the right of the front door was a small office, a computer on a desk, papers piled neatly around it and on the floor. Mickey knew that Parker had been down in New York recently. He wondered why. He desperately wanted to look through those papers.
He walked to the back of the house and stood in the segmented square of illumination cast by the night-light. The mist seemed thicker here, and when he looked behind him, it formed a near-impenetrable wall of white, obscuring the trees and the marshes beyond. Mickey shivered. He tried the back door, with no result. Once again, he pressed his face to the glass.
And something moved inside the house.
For a moment, he thought that it was reflected light, or a car passing on the road creating shadows in the room beyond the kitchen, but he had heard no car. He blinked, and tried to recall what he had seen. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might have been a woman, a woman in a dress that hung just below her knees. It wasn’t the kind of dress anyone would usually wear at this time of year. It was a summer dress.
He considered leaving, but then he realized that an opportunity to enter the house might just have presented itself without necessitating a breach of the law. If there was someone inside, maybe he could introduce himself as a friend of the detective. There might be a cup of coffee in it for him, or a drink, and once Mickey got himself seated he would be difficult to roust. Cockroaches were harder to get rid of than Mickey Wallace in interrogation mode.
“Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?” He knocked on the door. “Hello? I’m a friend of Mr. Parker’s. Can you—”
The light went out in the kitchen. The shock of it was so sudden that Mickey stumbled backward in fright, spots before his eyes as they adjusted to the dar Jtha/dikness. He recovered himself, and took a breath. Maybe it was time to leave. He didn’t want the woman inside to take fright and call the cops. That would jeopardize everything. Still, he carefully approached the door one more time. His flashlight was in his right hand, and he used it to rap on the door as he leaned against the glass, shielding his eyes with his left.
The woman was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She was looking right at him, her hands by her sides. He could see the shape of her legs through the thin material, but her face was cast in shadow.
“I’m sorry,” he called to her. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. My name is Michael Wallace. I’m a writer. Here’s my card.” He found a card in his pocket. “I’m going to slide it under the door so you’ll know I’m legit.”
He knelt down and slipped the card through. When he stood up, the woman was gone.
“Ma’am?”
Something white appeared at his feet. His card had been pushed back at him.
Jesus, thought Mickey. She’s at the door. She’s hiding at the door.
“I just want to talk to you,” he said.
go away
For a moment, Mickey wasn’t sure that he’d heard right. The words had been clear enough, but they seemed to come from behind him. He turned around, but there was nothing there, only mist. He put his face to the glass again, trying to catch a glimpse of the woman hiding inside. He could almost see her: a patch of darkness on the floor, a palpable presence. Who is she? he wondered. Parker’s girlfriend was supposed to be in Vermont, not here. Mickey planned to try to talk to her sometime over the next couple of weeks. Anyway, they were estranged. There was no reason for her being here, and even less reason for her to try to hide herself if she was.
Something began nagging at Mickey, something that made him uneasy, but he tried to force it from his mind. He only partially succeeded. He felt it lurking at the edge of his consciousness, just like the woman who was squatting in the shadows by the door, an unwelcome presence to which he was frightened of giving his complete attention.