John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

“And the woman?”

“Burned to death in another of the old houses. The case simply…faded away.”

“But not for Catherine?”

“No, not for her. She left the town after graduating from high school, but her parents stayed. The mother died about ten years ago, father shortly after. And Catherine Demeter just kept moving.”

“Did she ever go back to Haven?”

“No, not after the funerals. She said everything was dead to her there. And that’s it, pretty much. It all comes back to Haven.”

“Any boyfriends, or casuals?”

“None that she mentioned to me, and question time is over. Now get out. If you ever bring this up again, in public or in private, I’ll sue your ass for assault, harassment, and anything else my lawyer can come up with.”

I got up to leave.

“One more thing,” I said. “For Elizabeth Gordon and her continued nonacquaintance with Maibaum and Locke.”

“What?”

“The name of the woman who burned to death.”

“Modine. Adelaide Modine and her brother William. Now please, get the fuck out of my life.”

WILLIE BREW’S auto shop looked run down and unreliable, if not blatantly dishonest, from the outside. Inside it wasn’t a whole lot better, but Willie, a Pole whose name was unpronounceable and had been shortened to Brew by generations of customers, was just about the best mechanic I knew.

I had never liked this area of Queens, only a short distance north from the roars of the cars on the Long Island Expressway. Ever since I was a boy, I seemed to associate it with used car lots, old warehouses, and cemeteries. Willie’s garage, close by Kissena Park, had been a good source of information over the years, since every deadbeat friend of Willie’s with nothing better to do than listen in on other people’s business tended to congregate there at some time or another, but the whole area still made me uneasy. Even as an adult, I hated the drive from JFK to Manhattan as it skirted these neighborhoods, hated the sight of the rundown houses and liquor stores.

Manhattan, by comparison, was exotic, its skyline capable of seemingly endless change, depending upon one’s approach. My father had moved out to Westchester County as soon as he could afford to, buying a small house near Grant Park. Manhattan was somewhere we went on weekends, my friends and I. Sometimes we would traverse the entire length of the island to stand on the walkway over the Brooklyn Bridge and stare back at the evolving skyline. Beneath us, the boards would vibrate with the passage of the traffic, but to me, it seemed like more than that: it was the vibration and hum of life itself. The cables linking the towers of the bridge would cut and dissect the cityscape before us, as if it had been clipped by a child’s scissors and reassembled against the blue sky.

After my father’s death, my mother had moved us back to Maine, to her hometown of Scarborough, where tree lines replaced cityscapes and only the racing enthusiasts, traveling from Boston and New York to the races at Scarborough Downs, brought with them the sights and smells of the big cities. Maybe that was why I always felt like a visitor when I looked at Manhattan: I always seemed to be seeing the city through new eyes.

Willie’s place was situated in a neighborhood that was fighting gentrification tooth and nail. Willie’s block had been bought by the owner of the Japanese noodle house next door-he had other interests in downtown Flushing’s Little Asia and seemed to want to extend his reach farther south-and Willie was involved in a partially legal battle to ensure that he wasn’t shut down. The Japanese responded by sending fish smells through the vents into Willie’s garage. Willie sometimes got his own back by getting Arno, his chief mechanic, to drink some beers and eat a Chinese meal, then stumble outside, stick his fingers down his throat, and vomit outside the noodle house. “Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese-all that shit looks the same when it comes out,” Willie used to say.

Inside, Arno -small, wiry, and dark-was working on the engine of a beat-up Dodge. The air was thick with the smell of fish and noodles. My ’69 Mustang was raised up on a platform, unrecognizable bits and pieces of its internal workings strewn around on the floor. It looked no more likely to be on the road again in the near future than James Dean. I’d called earlier to tell Willie I’d be dropping by. The least he could have done was pretend to be doing something with it when I arrived.

The sound of loud swearing came from inside Willie’s office, which was up a set of wooden stairs to the right of the garage floor. The door flew open and Willie rumbled down the steps, grease on his bald head and his blue mechanic’s overalls open to the waist to show a dirty white T-shirt straining over his huge belly. He climbed arduously up a set of boxes placed beneath the vent in a step pattern and put his mouth to the grille.

“You slant-eyed sons of bitches,” he shrieked. “Quit stinkin’ my garage out with fish or I’m gonna get nuclear on your ass.” There was the sound of something shouted in Japanese from the other end of the vent, and then a burst of Oriental laughter. Willie thumped the grille with the heel of his hand and climbed down. He squinted at me in the semi-darkness before recognizing me.

“Bird, how you doin’? You want a coffee?”

“I want a car. My car. The car you’ve had for over a week now.”

Willie looked crestfallen. “You’re angry with me,” he said in mock-soothing tones. “I understand your anger. Anger is good. Your car, on the other hand, is not good. Your car is bad. The engine’s shot to shit. What have you been running it on, nuts and old nails?”

“Willie, I need my car. The taxi drivers are treating me like an old friend. Some of them have even stopped trying to rip me off. I’ve considered hiring a rental car to save myself embarrassment. In fact, the only reason I haven’t hit you for a car is that you said the repairs would take a day or two at most.”

Willie slouched over to the car and nudged a cylindrical piece of metal with the toe of his boot.

“ Arno, what’s the deal on Bird’s Mustang?”

“It’s shit,” said Arno. “Tell him we’ll give him five hundred dollars to scrap it.”

“ Arno says to give you five hundred to scrap it.”

“I heard him. Tell Arno I’ll burn his house down if he doesn’t fix my car.”

“Day after tomorrow,” came a voice from under the hood. “Sorry for the delay.”

Willie clapped me on the shoulder with a greasy hand.

“Come up for a coffee, listen to the local gossip.” Then, quietly: “Angel wants to see you. I told him you’d be around.”

I nodded and followed him up the stairs. Inside the office, which was surprisingly neat, four men sat around a desk drinking coffee and whiskey from tin mugs. I nodded to Tommy Q, who I’d busted once for handling pirated video-cassettes, and a thickly mustached hot-wire guy known, unsurprisingly, as Groucho. Beside him sat Willie’s other assistant, Jay, who, at sixty-five, was ten years older than Willie but looked at least ten years older than that again. Beside him sat Coffin Ed Harris.

“You know Coffin Ed?” said Willie.

I nodded. “Still boosting dead guys, Ed?”

“Naw, man,” said Coffin Ed. “I gave all that up a long time ago. I got a bad back.”

Coffin Ed Harris had been the kidnapper to beat all kidnappers. Coffin Ed figured that live hostages were too much like real work, since there was no telling what they might do or who might come looking for them. The dead were easier to handle, so Coffin Ed took to robbing mortuaries.

He would watch the death notices, pick a decedent who came from a reasonably wealthy family, and then steal the corpse from the mortuary or the funeral home. Until Coffin Ed came along and bucked the system, funeral homes weren’t usually well guarded. Coffin Ed would store the corpses in an industrial freezer he kept in his basement and then ask for a ransom, usually nothing too heavy. Most of the relatives were quite happy to pay in order to get their loved ones back before they started to rot.