John Connolly - Nocturnes

“Afraid of what?”

“He said that he was going to be punished for what he’d done to those kids, and for what he was going to do to me eventually, I guess. He said that he was damned, but that he wouldn’t go without a fight. He told me that he’d taken precautions. I didn’t know what he meant. I thought later that he was talking about the way he’d reinforced the basement door, but now I’m not so sure.”

The drape twitched again in the front window, this time with a little more force.

“There was always black paint on his hands,” Denny continued, “and he was hanging paper and working on the house all of the time. I remember that most of the walls had been covered while I was kept in the basement, because he’d nearly finished the job when the police came for him. There were other things, odd things. During the first days, there was a pile of bones in the corner of the basement. He told me that they came from dogs. Later, he took them away and buried them.”

“He told you this?”

“Yeah. His hands were dirty, and he must have seen me looking at them. He said that he’d been working in his yard, burying the bones. That was when he first began talking about the precautions he was taking, and about how he wasn’t going to be pulled from his home without a fight.”

The front door of the Czabo house opened, and the bulky young man appeared on the step. He was now dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweat top. There were scuffed sneakers on his feet.

“I don’t know if any of that is helpful,” said Denny.

“It may be,” I said. “Listen, Denny, I have to go, but thanks for that. I’ll let you know how things work out.”

I killed the connection just as the man I took to be Edna Czabo’s lover reached the end of the path.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked. His voice was a little high, and softer than I’d expected.

“Your mother,” I replied. “She says you’re to come home and stop screwing around with other men’s wives. Oh, and she wants you to pick up some milk along the way.”

He didn’t look too pleased at the reply, but he didn’t make a move either, although I could see his hands almost involuntarily tense into fists. He was probably smarter than he looked, which made me wonder what he was doing with Edna Czabo.

“Why are you looking for Ray?” he asked.

“I have some questions for him.”

“Ray doesn’t come around here much.”

“Did you scare him away?”

“It’s all over between him and Edna. He moved out.”

“So she told me. Do you know where he is?”

“Edna says he’s in Bangor someplace. I don’t know where.”

“That’s not very helpful,” I said. “So if you didn’t come out here to help, why did you come out?”

His head jerked back slightly in the direction of the house, and the woman within.

“Did she send you out to frighten me?” I asked.

He had the decency to look embarrassed.

“We just don’t want any trouble. I don’t want any trouble.”

I sized him up. A man who says he doesn’t want trouble has usually experienced trouble before, and has a pretty good expectation of experiencing it again. If Ray Czabo had done something wrong, then I could just be the first of any number of people who might come knocking on his wife’s door, the cops among them.

“You got a name?” I said.

“Tillman,” he said. “Casey Tillman.”

“Anything to Gunnar Tillman?”

He nodded. “He’s my old man.”

“I thought I saw a resemblance.”

Gunnar Tillman was bad news, the kind of minor-league hood that places like Bangor threw up occasionally like a piece of rotten fish. He was involved in drugs, prostitution, and maybe a little smuggling of immigrants across the Canadian border, if the stories were to be believed. I could understand now why his son didn’t want the cops sniffing around his affairs.

“You see much of him?” I asked.

“As little as I can.”

I didn’t know if that was true. From what I’d heard of Gunnar Tillman, he made the decisions on the extent of his involvement in people’s lives. It seemed unlikely that he’d accept any form of rejection from his own son.

I handed Casey Tillman my card.

“You think of anything, or if you hear from Ray, let me know. I wasn’t lying to you: Ray’s not in any trouble that I know of, but I do need to talk to him. If you’re being straight with me, then I won’t say anything about you to the cops unless circumstances change and there’s no way to avoid it.”

Tillman slipped the card into a pocket of his jeans.

“Nice car,” he said, pointing with his chin at my Mustang. “I run an auto shop in Orono. You ever need some work done, you give me a call. It’s under my name in the book.”

With that, he turned and walked back to the house. Edna Czabo met him at the door. I wondered if we should have staged a fight, just for appearances’ sake. I settled for trying to look shaken. She seemed happy with that, but shot me another orally suggestive gesture before she slammed the door, just in case I’d forgotten my place.

I got Ray Czabo’s new address from a detective named Jeff Weis over in the Bangor PD. Ray had a habit of leaving his business cards around in the hope that someone might give him a call if something juicy came up. They rarely did, as most Maine cops regarded Voodoo Ray as low enough to ride a rat, but you had to admire his capacity for optimism. Since his separation, he had been living in a first-floor apartment over by the Bangor municipal golf course. It was the kind of place where kids rode bicycles down the hallways and there was a constant smell of burnt fat in the air. There was no reply when I rang his doorbell, so I headed around to the front of the building and peered in through his window. I saw a TV, some true-crime magazines on a coffee table, and stacks of cardboard boxes filled with files. Some of the top boxes had been overturned, and their contents left on the floor. That wasn’t like Ray Czabo. He was a meticulous man. I knew that from my own personal encounter with him, when I had forced him to hand over the souvenir he had taken from my house, his nose still bleeding upon the floor. There had been nothing out of place in his office then. Everything was clean and dusted.

The top window was open to allow a little air in. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then slipped on my gloves and hoisted myself up onto the sill. I reached in to open the latch on the main window, then entered Voodoo Ray’s apartment. It was cold inside. The bed in the apartment’s sole bedroom was neatly made, and the kitchen was tidy apart from a cup soaking in the sink. The dishcloth on the rack was bone dry, and so was the towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Maybe Ray didn’t take a lot of showers, or maybe he hadn’t been home in a while.

I examined the papers on the floor. They were mostly reports of serious crimes clipped from newspapers and magazines, some of them with handwritten pages of notes appended by Ray. One or two of the cases were familiar to me. Most, being out of state, were not. Apart from the disordered files, there was nothing suspicious about Ray’s apartment. I closed the window and went to the front door to let myself out. My foot hit something light, which spun across the carpet and bounced against the wall.

I picked up the black plastic case from the floor. It was an empty film canister.

Papers spilled on the floor, and a film canister by the door: they were small things, and could be dismissed as the carelessness of a man in a hurry. If it was Ray’s doing, then I wondered why he had been in such a rush to leave, and if the photographs he had taken included one of a little girl with a baseball bat in her hand. I hadn’t seen any developing equipment in Ray’s closet, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t responsible for the picture. The other possibility was that someone had searched Ray’s house before me, and that among the items that person had removed was at least one roll of film.