John Connolly - Nocturnes

I left the apartment, closing the door gently behind me, then stuck my card underneath it in case Ray came back. I still had questions I wanted to ask him about the Grady house. As I stood, the door across from Ray’s opened and an elderly man in a clean blue shirt peered out from across a security chain.

“I’ll call the police,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

He squinted at me.

“You shouldn’t be in there. That’s Mr. Czabo’s apartment.”

I had to admire the old guy. There were few neighbors in this kind of place with the courage to stand up for those around them.

I showed him my ID.

“I’m a private investigator. I got no reply from inside, so I thought I’d leave my card for Ray.”

The old man gestured with his hand. I handed him my wallet. He looked at it for a time, pursed his lips while he considered its authenticity, then handed it back to me.

“I guess you’re straight,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Have you seen Mr. Czabo around lately?”

The old guy shook his head.

“Not for a while. Last time I saw him, it was when he had the trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Two men came. A little fella and a big fella. The little fella was older, but younger than me. They shouted some at Mr. Czabo, then went outside and kicked in the side of his car. I was going to call the police then as well, but Mr. Czabo told me not to. He said it was a misunderstanding.”

“When was this?”

“A while back. Could have been three weeks, maybe more.”

“Do you remember anything else about the men involved?”

“The older one was small, with white curly hair and too many gold chains for a man his age. The other one was just huge. No neck. Looked like a throwback to the cavemen.”

The older man sounded like Gunnar Tillman. I figured his companion for the hired help.

I thanked Voodoo Ray’s neighbor again.

“Well,” he said, as his door began to close, “I give a damn. This place will go to shit if people don’t look out for each other.”

“You’re a dying breed,” I said.

“Maybe, but I’m not dead yet,” he replied, and then he closed the door.

A few minutes from Ray’s place was a strip mall, anchored by a large drugstore. It was a slim chance, but I pulled into the lot and parked outside the store. The photo desk was beside the registers, staffed by a bored-looking teenager in a bright yellow polo shirt.

“Hi,” I said. “I think my wife left some photos in here maybe a week ago. We can’t find the receipt, but we’d really like our pictures.”

“You sure she left them in here?”

I did my best impression of a frustrated husband.

“She thinks this is where she left them to be developed. She’s distracted at the moment. We’re expecting our first baby.”

I wasn’t sure which was worse: lying or embellishing the lie with the truth. The photo guy didn’t seem to care much either way.

“What’s the name?” he said.

“Czabo.”

He flicked wearily through the envelopes behind the counter. About halfway through, he stopped and removed two of them from the cabinet.

“Czabo,” he said. “Two rolls.”

He didn’t ask for ID. I thanked him and paid for the pictures, then walked out of the store feeling like a spy.

I opened the envelopes in the car. One batch of photographs contained pictures of Ray’s buddies in a bar, a couple of empty landscapes that might have been a crime scene or an attempt by Ray to get in touch with nature, and two photos of some damage to the wing of a green car that was probably Ray’s. I guessed it was the result of Gunnar and his goon kicking in the wing. The damage didn’t look too serious, and the pictures were probably for insurance purposes.

The second set of photographs began with five scenes of Ray’s house, the one currently occupied by his wife and her toy boy. Casey Tillman was in each of the pictures, mostly getting into or out of his car, or greeting Edna Czabo with a kiss and an embrace. It looked like Ray wasn’t as happy about staying out of his wife’s affairs as she appeared to be about staying out of his.

Casey was also in two more photographs, this time taken outside the garage that bore his name. There were two other men in the pictures with him. One looked like the Missing Link, assuming the Missing Link had learned to tie its own shoelaces. The other was Gunnar Tillman. He was much smaller than his son, and any weight he was carrying was still more muscle than fat. His hair was white and curly, and contrasted nicely with his winter tan. He was wearing a golf sweater and shiny sweat pants. Gold jewelry glittered in the sunlight at his wrist and around his neck. Gunnar Tillman clearly shopped at Hoods-R-Us.

It wasn’t a good idea for Ray Czabo to be shooting clandestine photographs of Tillman, but maybe he hoped to win back his wife by showing her that her lover hadn’t entirely cut off relations with his criminal father. Somehow I felt Ray was clutching at straws. Edna Czabo had a new man in her life, one that was a lot younger than the old one, and with a little grit to him. Since she wasn’t running for the presidency, or leading her local Girl Scout troop, I didn’t think she would be too concerned about him meeting up with his old man occasionally.

The last photographs were all images of the Grady house, taken from every possible angle short of dangling upside down from the drainpipe. According to the digital date imprinted in the right-hand corner of the frames, they were all shot a couple of weeks before, in the space of about fifteen minutes. Ray had even managed to photograph the interior of the house through cracks in the window boards. I quickly flicked through them once, and saw nothing to make them stand out in any way. I went through them again, this time more slowly, and found a detail in the second-to-last photo that made me pause.

It was the photograph Ray had taken by pressing the camera to the boards. Most of the image was obscured by the reflection of the flash on the glass, but the left-hand side was relatively clear. It showed the mirror on the wall of the reception room, the same mirror that I had seen when I first entered the house.

Reflected in the glass was the shape of a man. I could just make out his back, which was clothed in a dark jacket, but his face was not visible. His reflection was turned away from the camera. I flicked back through the images one more time, to confirm what I had seen, then laid them to one side.

In Ray Czabo’s photographs, all the doors and windows in the Grady house were clearly padlocked from the outside. There was no way that anyone could be inside.

Yet someone was.

That night Rachel complained of pains in her stomach, so I took her to Maine Medical and spent two hours in the waiting room while the doctors looked her over. I read the newspapers for a time, but they seemed to be filled with suffering and I didn’t need to read about people dying while Rachel was in pain.

Eventually, the doctors let her out. They told us that there was nothing to be concerned about, and that everything looked fine. We got home at about 2 A.M., and Rachel began crying shortly after. I couldn’t console her, and she couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak, so I held her in my arms until her crying stopped and she at last fell asleep, her final moments of wakefulness punctuated by small hiccuping sobs.

The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened, and I didn’t know what else to do except to let her be.

They arrived at the Portland airport shortly after 10 A.M. Its official title was the Portland International Jetport, which had a kind of Buck Rogers ring to it, although futurism and Portland weren’t concepts that sat easily together. I kind of liked it that way.