John Connolly - Nocturnes

“Do you know who bought them?”

“I can find out for you right now, if you want.”

He took out his cell and tapped in a phone number.

“See, I did have a use for this after all,” he said, as his call was answered. “Hi, can you put me through to Detective Brian Harrison, please?”

I didn’t know Harrison. He came on the line and he and Clem exchanged greetings for a while and caught up on news of mutual friends. Eventually, Clem asked him about the sale of the Grady books. After a lot of “uh-huhs” he thanked Harrison, promised to meet him for a drink, then hung up.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” he said. “There had to be a woo-woo angle. The guy who bought the books claimed to be working for Bowe amp; Heinrich. He said he was Milton Bowe’s nephew.”

Bowe amp; Heinrich was a well-known firm of rare-book dealers based in Bangor.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Bowe amp; Heinrich never heard of him.”

“Milton Bowe arrived at state police headquarters a day later to take a look at the books himself, but they were already gone by then. He was pretty pissed at what happened. He didn’t like the idea of some weirdo impersonating his nephew, or stealing books from under his nose.”

“Weirdo?”

“He looked like a tramp. Some of these collector types do, I hear. They spend more money on books and antiques than they do on clothes. This guy had an old coat and a shoe that was speaking to him. He paid in cash, though: ten hundred-dollar bills, which was probably more than Bowe would have paid, the cheap bastard. If this guy committed a crime, it was a victimless one.”

I didn’t need to ask Clem any more about the buyer. I knew who he was.

“You decided how you’re going to handle this thing?” Clem asked.

I gave a noncommittal reply. I wasn’t sure yet what I could do, other than dig up old memories and watch as the dust they raised settled itself on the Grady house.

“Well, you need help, you let me know,” said Clem.

We stood to leave. I picked up the check, despite ribbing Clem earlier about his wealth.

“It’s taken care of,” he said. “I left my credit card behind the bar.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Hey, it was good to see you. I don’t get to talk to someone thirty years younger than me so often now. Makes me feel like less of an old fart.”

The weather had turned chill. My breath hung like an unfulfilled promise in the afternoon air.

“Have you ever been back to the Grady house?” I asked Clem, as we walked to our cars.

“Nope. No cause to go there. Even if I had to go back, I wouldn’t stay too long. There’s something unhealthy in the atmosphere of the place. You’ve been there; you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t know better, I’d say that there were chemicals in the walls and the floors. In the days after Grady killed himself, most of the men who spent time in the house complained of nausea and vomiting. I had headaches for weeks afterward. That was more than twenty years ago. It could be that it’s not as strong now, but I don’t doubt that it’s still there.”

His words brought back my own disorientation after spending a little time in the Grady house. Clem was right. Whatever had infected the house was still present, engaged in a process of slow decay like the half-life of radioactive waste.

We parted on Commercial. Clem gripped my hand tightly in both of his.

“No ‘if onlys,’ ” he said. “Remember that. Don’t let anything happen to that little girl. There are too many lost children. You know that better than anyone else. There are just too many lost children…”

I drove up to Bangor that afternoon. Voodoo Ray Czabo and his wife had moved back up to Maine so that she could be closer to her mother, which proved that not only was Ray kind of unpleasant, he was also dumb as well. When a woman like Edna Czabo says she wants to be closer to her mother, then you might as well start packing your bags and looking for a bachelor apartment, because no good can come of it. The talk was that Ray Czabo’s marriage was on the rocks.

Ray was a skinny guy who dressed neatly, smelled nice, and could be superficially charming when the necessity arose, but his fascination with suffering and the vicarious pleasure-and actual profit-he derived from it left him a couple of rungs below blowflies on the moral ladder. I’d never had the joy of making Mrs. Czabo’s acquaintance, but from what I heard she made Ray seem like good company.

There were two vehicles in the driveway, a sensible Nissan and a souped-up Firebird, when I pulled up outside the Czabos’ nondescript single-story house, surrounded by similarly anonymous houses with marginally newer paintwork. The grass in the yard was patchy and unkempt, and the trees and bushes that bordered their property hadn’t been pruned that year. Light was already fading as I walked up to the door and pressed the buzzer. After a couple of minutes, the door was opened by a woman in a pale blue bathrobe. Her feet were bare, her hair was tousled, and she had the smoking butt of a cigarette in her hand. I picked out the remains of lipstick at the corners of her mouth, and her chin and cheeks were red and irritated.

“Mrs. Czabo?” I said.

“That’s me.”

She finished the cigarette, seemed to look for somewhere to put it out, then contented herself with tossing it onto the step by my feet. I stamped it out for her.

“I was looking for your husband.”

“Who are you?”

I showed her my license.

“My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private-”

“Yeah, I know all about you. You broke Ray’s nose.”

“I didn’t break his nose. He ran into a wall.”

“He ran into a wall because he was running away from you.”

I conceded the point.

“I still need to talk to him.”

“What’s he done now? Dug up a corpse?”

“I just have some questions for him. He’s not in any trouble.”

“Yeah, well, Ray don’t live here no more. He moved out a couple of months ago.”

“You know where he is?”

She picked at something between her teeth. Her fingers emerged clutching a short hair. I tried not to think of its possible origins.

“He does his thing, I do mine. I don’t pay no heed to his business.”

I heard a toilet flush in the house and a man appeared in the hallway with a towel wrapped around his waist. He was younger than Mrs. Czabo by a decade, which made him about my age, but he looked bulkier and stronger than I was. He glanced at me, then asked her if everything was okay.

“I’ll holler if I need you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that it would be a sorry day when she needed his help.

“I just want an address,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Cocksucker,” she said. “You hear me?” Her voice was low, and I could smell the staleness on her breath.

“Ray said you were a cocksucker, and he was right. That’s all you are. So why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and leave us all in peace?”

“Gee,” I said, “you’re a nice lady.”

She made a gesture using her tongue and her right hand, just in case I wasn’t clear on what being a cocksucker entailed, then closed the door in my face.

My cell phone rang as I walked down Edna Czabo’s garden path. I didn’t recognize the number on the caller display. It turned out to be Denny Maguire.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

I leaned against my car and looked at the Czabo house. A drape twitched in one of the front windows.

“Sure,” I said.

“Look, this could be nothing. You asked me if I remembered anything that Grady said while I was in that basement. Like I told you, I was pretty out of it before they rescued me, so most of it’s a blur, but I do recall him telling me that he was afraid.”