30
Instead of traveling straight to Portland after arriving in Boston, I stayed at a cheap motel on Route 1 near Saugus and ate a good steak dinner at Frank Giuffrida’s Hilltop Steakhouse. When I was a boy, my father would treat my mother and me to an early dinner at the Hilltop when we were heading up to Maine to see my grandfather each summer, and I always associated it with the beginning of our vacations. We would sit at the same table every time, or as near as we could get to it. There would be a view over Route 1, and my father would order a rib steak as big as his head, with all the trimmings, while my mother tut-tutted good naturedly and fretted about his heart.
Frank had died back in 2004, and an investment firm now owned the Hilltop, but it was still a place where regular folk could go for a decent steak dinner without breaking the bank. I hadn’t been back there in about thirty years, not since my father took his own life. There was too much of him associated with it, but in recent times I had learned more about my father and the reasons for what he had done, and I had reached an accommodation with the past. It meant that places like the Hilltop were no longer tinged with the same sadness, and I was glad that it remained pretty much as I remembered it, with its illuminated sixty-foot Saguaro cactus outside, and its herd of fiberglass cows. I slipped the hostess ten bucks to give me my family’s old table to myself, and ordered the ribeye in memory of my father. The dinner salad was just a little smaller than before, but since the original salad would have fed a small family it meant that there was less to throw away. I drank a glass of wine, and watched the cars go by, and thought about Epstein, and Liat, and an airplane hidden by the woods.
And I thought about the Collector, because one matter had remained untouched upon between Epstein and me, although Louis had raised it before I left with Walter to catch my plane. What Louis suggested was that, if the Collector were in possession of a full or partial list of names, he would almost certainly begin targeting those on it. This begged the question: if my name was on it, would he then also choose to target me? For that reason alone it was necessary to arrange a meeting in Lynn with the lawyer Eldritch, to whom the Collector was linked in ways that I did not fully understand.
I finished dinner, skipped dessert for fear of busting my insides, and headed back to my motel room. I had just turned on the light when my cell phone rang. It was Walter Cole. Davis Tate, the toxic figure on talk radio whose name appeared on the lists, was dead. According to Walter, Tate had been shot in the head, but some knife wounds had been inflicted on him before he died. His wallet, containing his credit cards and 150 dollars in cash, was still in his jacket pocket, but his cell phone was missing and a tan line on his left wrist suggested that his killer might have taken his wristwatch. The theft of the wristwatch, which would later be revealed as a modestly expensive Tudor, puzzled the detectives investigating the killing. Why leave the money but take the watch? I could have told them why, and so could Walter, but we did not.
The man who killed Tate had magpie eyes.
The Collector had just added another trophy to his cabinet of curiosities.
Early the next morning, I drove to Lynn.
If the firm of Eldritch & Associates had been raking in big bucks in recent years, it hadn’t seen fit to pump them back into its offices. It continued to occupy the top two floors of a bleak edifice too dull to qualify as an eyesore but still sufficiently ugly to make the neighboring businesses look as though they would have upped foundations and moved if they could, and it wasn’t as if they were housed in architectural gems either. The unprepossessing exterior of Tulley’s bar, a prime example of fortress design, stood to the right of Eldritch’s building. On its left, a telecom store previously run by, and for, Cambodians had been replaced by a telecom store run by, and for, Pakistanis. Short of putting up a sign inviting the American wing of Al Qaeda in for coffee and cookies, it couldn’t have advertised itself more as a target for federal surveillance in the current mood of distrust between the US and Pakistan. Otherwise, this stretch of Lynn was still the same accumulation of gray-green condos, nail salons, and ethnic restaurants that I remembered from previous visits.
The gold lettering on Eldritch’s upper windows announcing the presence of a lawyer inside was more flaked and faded than before, a graphic representation of Eldritch’s own slow physical decline. The first floor of the building remained unoccupied, but its windows were now barred and the filthy old glass had been replaced with dark, semi-reflecting panes. I tapped on one with a finger as I passed. It was strong and thick.
The street-level door no longer opened to the touch. Beside it, a simple intercom panel was set into the wall. There was no visible camera, but I was willing to bet good money that one or more sat behind the dark glass of that first-floor window. As if to confirm my suspicions, the door buzzed before I even had a chance to press the intercom button. Inside, the building remained reassuringly musty, every intake of breath bringing with it the smell of old carpets, impacted dust, cigarette smoke, and slowly peeling wallpaper. The paintwork was a sickly yellow, and marked on the right of the narrow stairway by decades of traffic. On the first landing was a door marked Bathroom, and looking down on it, from the second floor, was a frosted glass door with the firm’s name written in the same style of gold lettering that adorned the street-facing windows.
It was almost a relief to open the door and discover that the wooden counter remained in place, and behind it the big wooden desk, and behind that the heavily kohled and otherwise cosmeticized presence of Eldritch’s secretary, a woman who, if she had a last name, preferred not to share it with strangers, and, if she had a first name, probably never allowed it to be used, even with intimates, assuming anyone was foolhardy or lonely enough to attempt some form of intimacy with her to begin with. Her hair was currently dyed a gothic black, and rose from her head like a pile of coal slack. She had a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her, smoking away in a pond of butts, and all around her rose teetering piles of paper. She added to the nearest ones as I entered, yanking two sheets from her old green electric typewriter and carefully separating the carbon copy from the original before placing each on the top of its respective tower. She then picked up the cigarette, took a long drag on it, and squinted at me through the smoke. If the memo about the illegality of smoking in the workplace had reached her, I guess she’d burned it.
‘Good to see you again,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘Well, you know, it’s always nice to see a friendly face.’
‘Is it?’ she repeated.
‘Maybe not,’ I conceded.
‘Yeah.’
There was an uncomfortable silence, but it was still less uncomfortable than actually trying to conduct a conversation. She continued to puff on her cigarette and view me through the fug of the smoke. She produced a lot of smoke, so there was a limit to how much of me she could see through it. I suspected that she liked it better that way.
‘I’m here to see Mr Eldritch,’ I said, just before I threatened to lose sight of her entirely.
‘You have an appointment?’
‘No.’
‘He doesn’t see people without an appointment. You ought to have called ahead.’
‘I would have, but nobody ever answers the phone.’
‘We’re real busy. You could have left a message.’
‘You don’t have an answering service.’
‘You could have written. You can write, can’t you?’
‘I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, and it’s urgent.’
‘It always is.’ She sighed. ‘Name?’
‘Charlie Parker,’ I said. She knew my name. After all, she’d let me in without the aid of the intercom to identify me.
‘You got some ID?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘I look like a kidder to you?’
‘Not really.’ I handed over my license.
‘It’s the same picture as last time,’ she said.
‘That’s because I’m the same guy.’
‘Yeah.’ She made it sound as though that represented a regrettable lack of developmental ambition on my part. My license was handed back to me. She picked up the receiver on her beige phone and dialed a number.
‘That man is here again,’ she said, even though it had been years since my presence had dampened her day. She listened to the voice on the other end of the line, and put the phone down.
‘Mr Eldritch says you can go up.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Wouldn’t have been my choice,’ she said, and commenced feeding another double sheet of paper into her typewriter, shaking her head and scattering cigarette ash across her desk. ‘Wouldn’t have been my choice at all.’
I headed up to the third floor, where an unmarked door stood closed. I knocked, and a cracked voice told me to come in. Thomas Eldritch rose from behind his desk as I entered, a pale, wrinkled hand extended in greeting. He was dressed, as usual, in a black jacket and pinstripe trousers with a matching vest. The gold chain of a watch extended from a buttonhole on his vest to one of the pockets. The bottom button of the vest remained undone. Eldritch adhered to tradition in his modes of attire as in so many other matters.
‘Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘It is a pleasure, as always.’