John Connolly - The Lovers

“Not yet.”

“If you wait for him to come to you, you may find that his anger is commensurately greater. Call him. Tell him to come down and talk.”

“And do I also tell him about you?”

“Tell him everything, Mr. Gallagher. You’ve been faithful to your friend’s memory for a quarter of a century. You’ve protected his son, and us, for a long time. We’re grateful to you, but it’s time now to expose these hidden truths to the light.”

“Thank you,” said Jimmy.

“No, thank you. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

The phone was hung up. Jimmy knew that it might be the last time he heard that voice.

And, in truth, he wasn’t sorry.

T HE DAY AFTER MYconfrontation with Mickey Wallace, I decided to tell Dave Evans that I wanted to take a week off from the Bear. I was determined to put pressure on Jimmy Gallagher, and maybe hit Eddie Grace again. I couldn’t do that while commuting back and forth between Portland and New York and relying on having Sundays off.

And something else had emerged. Walter Cole had been unable to turn up anything new about the investigation into the Pearl River killings, except for one curious detail.

“The reports are too clean,” he told me over the phone. “The whole thing was a whitewash. I spoke to a guy in records. He said the file is so thin, if you turn it sideways it’s invisible.”

“That’s no surprise. They buried it. There was no percentage in doing anything else.”

“Yeah, well, I still think there was more to it than that. The record was purged. You ever hear of something called Unit Five?”

“Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Ten years ago, all records relating to the Pearl River killings were ring-fenced. Any request for information beyond what was in the files had to go through this Unit Five clearance, which meant contacting the commissioner’s office. My guy didn’t feel comfortable even talking about it, but anyone who wants to know more than the bare details about what happened at Pearl River has to put in a request to Unit Five.”

But Walter wasn’t finished.

“You know what else is covered by the Unit Five order? The deaths of Susan and Jennifer Parker.”

“So what’s Unit Five?” I asked.

“I think you are.”

I met Dave at Arabica, at the corner of Free and Cross, which, as well as having some of the best coffee in town, now occupied the best space, with art on the walls and light pouring through its big picture windows. The Pixies were playing in the background. All things considered, it was hard to find fault with the place.

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Dave wasn’t overjoyed at being asked to give me time away from the bar, and I could hardly blame him. He was about to lose two of his staff, one to maternity and the other to a girlfriend in California. I knew he felt that he was spending too much time doing general bar work and too little time on paperwork and accounts. I had been hired to take some of that burden off him, and instead I was leaving him mired even more deeply than he had been before I arrived.

“I’m trying to run a business here, Charlie,” said Dave. “You’re killing me.”

“We’re not real busy, Dave,” I said. “ Gary can take care of the Nappi delivery, and then I’ll be back in time for next week’s truck. We’re overstocked on some of the microbrews anyway, so we can let them run down.”

“What about tomorrow night?”

“Nadine’s been asking for extra shifts. Let her take up some of the slack.”

Dave buried his face in his hands.

“I hate you,” he said.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Take your week off. If we’re still here when you get back, you owe me. You owe me big time.”

That night did nothing to improve Dave’s mood. Somebody tried to steal the ornamental bear head from the dining room, and we only spotted that it was missing when the thief was about to drive from the parking lot with the head sticking out of the passenger window. We were hit by cocktail freaks, so that even Gary, who seemed to have a better knowledge of cocktails than most, was forced to resort to the cheat sheet kept behind the bar. Students ordered rounds of cherry bombs and Jäger bombs, and the sickly smell of Red Bull tainted the air. We changed fifteen kegs, three times as many as the average for an evening although still some way off the record of twenty-two.

And there was also sex in the air. There was a woman in her fifties at the far end of the bar who couldn’t have been more predatory if she’d had claws and razor teeth, and she was soon joined by two or three others to form a pack. The bartenders called them “flossies” after a semimythical dental supplies saleswoman who was reputed to have serviced a series of men in the parking lot over the course of a single evening. Eventually, they attracted a couple of International Players of the World to themselves, macho types whose aftershave fought a battle of the fragrances with the lingering odor of Red Bull. At one point, I considered turning a hose on them all to cool them down, but before the need arose they eventually departed for a darker corner of town.

By the time 1 A.M. arrived, all fifteen of the staff were exhausted, but nobody wanted to go home just yet. After the beer towers were cleaned and the coolers stocked, we fixed some burgers and fries, and most people had a drink to unwind. We turned off the satellite system that provided music for the bar, and instead put a mellow iPod playlist on shuffle: Sun Kil Moon, Fleet Foxes, the reissue of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blues . Finally, people started to drift away, and Dave and I checked that everything was off in the kitchen, snuffed the last of the candles, checked the bathrooms to make sure everyone was out, then put the cash in the safe and locked up. We said good-bye in the parking lot, and before we went our separate J aur separaways Dave told me again that he hated me.

After I had opened the front door of my house, I paused at the threshold and listened. My encounter with Mickey Wallace, and his story about the two figures he had glimpsed, had unsettled me. I had let those ghosts go. They didn’t belong here any longer. Yet, as before, when I had gone through the house after Wallace’s departure, I experienced no sense of dread, no true unease. Instead, the house was quiet, and I felt its emptiness. Whatever had been here was now gone.

The message light on my answering machine was flashing. I hit the button, and heard Jimmy Gallagher’s voice. He sounded a little drunk, but the message was still clear and simple, and the timing of it preordained.

“Charlie, come on down here,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. -BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790),

POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK

J IMMY G ALLAGHER MUST HAVEbeen watching for me to come, as he answered the door before I even knocked. I imagined him, for a moment, sitting at his window, his face reflected in the gathering dark, his fingers tapping on the sill, anxiously seeking the one whom he was expecting, but as I looked into his eyes I saw that there was no anxiety, no fear or concern. In truth, he appeared more relaxed than I had ever seen him. He was wearing a T-shirt over a pair of paint-stained tan trousers, topped off by a Yankees hooded top and an old pair of penny loafers. He looked like a man in his twenties who had suddenly woken up from a nap to find that he had aged forty years in appearance while still being forced to wear all the same clothes. I had always believed him to be a man for whom appearance was everything, for I could never recall him without a jacket and a clean, starched shirt, often finished with a tasteful silk tie. Now, all formality had been stripped from him, and I wondered, as the night drew on and I listened to the secrets pour out of him, if those strictures he had placed on his dress had merely been one part of the defenses he had constructed to protect not only himself and his own identity, but the memories and lives of those about whom he cared.