Authors: Stephan Talty
“You look exhausted,” he said. “Did you sleep?”
“I slept fine.”
“I hate it when you lie to me. Hurts my feelings.”
“Then don’t ask stupid questions.”
“Listen, Linda wants you to come over for dinner. The kids miss you.”
Abbie felt herself soften a bit.
“How are they? Is Junior walking?”
“No, but he’s eating. I think he’s going to roll before he walks.”
“He is the cutest.”
“Come by and see. Tomorrow night. Pasta and Molson Golden ale.”
“Tell Linda thanks. But I just don’t have time right now.”
She felt the needles in the back of her brain, like a series of wires had broken and the ends were sticking into her nerves.
Abbie parked near her house and walked down Elmwood Avenue toward her favorite taco spot. The street was dotted with old Victorians, and years ago as part of an urban revitalization project they’d been painted in wild, bold colors: lavender and hunter green, pistachio and lime. Just walking down the street made you feel like you’d entered a fairy tale, though some of the paint was now peeling around the corners and doors. A few of the Victorians had been turned into boardinghouses by owners unable to meet the mortgage payments; one had even become a halfway house for heroin addicts. That was the one with the men smoking on the porch all day long.
It was Abbie’s dream to buy one of the big Victorians and bring it back to its glory, refurbishing it painstakingly by hand, putting down the new polyurethane herself, choosing the new and unfashionable wallpaper, scouring church sales and yard sales for the right dining room table. Every time she walked down Elmwood, she would debate which was her current favorite, what she would buy if a hundred thousand dollars fell into her lap. Right now it was 182, a rambling gray and white beautiful monstrosity with a widow’s walk and two tall spires that were topped in black tiles that made them look like pinecones.
She stopped in front of the house, feeling the late afternoon sunshine across her face, and imagined herself two years from now, in spring, painting the porch with old overalls on, waving to her neighbors and complaining about the weather. She felt a little stab of happiness for the first time in weeks.
At Mighty Taco, she ordered a taco salad and a loganberry drink—a local specialty—and sat in one of the booths close to the window that looked out on Elmwood. Something about the plastic monkeys had been bothering her, lurking in the back of her thoughts but refusing to be nailed down. She stared out the window, trying to coax the thought from the back of her brain. She let her eyes unfocus. The edges of the passing cars and the steel-and-glass lawyer’s office across the street blurred, and Abbie listened to her own breathing, in and out, in and out.
She visualized the first monkey. The paint—and it was paint, not a dye in the plastic itself—of the eyes and the red collar around the neck was worn down, even chipped. These toys were old, heavily used. The killer hadn’t gone out and bought a new set to leave behind. Assuming they belonged to the killer, he must have been saving them for years. Why?
How many people save their favorite toys
, she thought,
and what does it mean if they do? Souvenirs of a happy childhood, or mementos of a howling nightmare, the beginning of his urges to kill? I have to track down the manufacturer. Find out when these things were last produced. Maybe that can give us a maximum age for the suspect. Assuming his parents bought them for him new
.
She was finishing the last bite of the taco salad when her phone rang.
“Kearney.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Billy fucking Carney.”
The flesh between her eyebrows creased. Billy sounded wide open.
“I didn’t talk to anyone. What happened?”
“I’ve been getting phone calls. Someone whispering and then laughing this evil little laugh.”
“How many times?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Four or five. Always at night. I hung up once and a second later my cell phone rang, same bullshit.”
Abbie told herself to think. Had she mentioned Billy to anyone? No, she hadn’t.
“And there’s a car I’ve seen around my house three times since you dropped by. Next time I see it I’m gonna put a brick through its window.”
“Slow down, Billy. I need details. What kind of car?”
“Like you don’t know, Ab.”
“Billy, Billy, listen to me. What … kind … of … car?”
“A Taurus. A fucking green Taurus.”
Abbie grabbed her jacket and slipped into it as she walked, fast, toward her Saab.
“Okay. Tell me where you are. I need to talk to you if you want me to help you.”
“I’m on top of City Hall with a fucking sniper rifle, okay? Aiming at police headquarters. Tell that to the fucks who’ve been tailing me. Or are they listening in right now?”
Abbie got to her car, slipped into the driver’s seat, and started it up.
“Tell me where you are, Billy. You need to talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to help you, and if there was anyone else who could, you’d have called them already.”
Silence. She could hear traffic in the background. He was out in the open somewhere.
“Tell me now, where—”
“I’m in the Bowl.”
“In the what?”
“The Bowl, the baseball diamonds, Caz Park. Remember? Where
I won the state title, Ab. Jesus Christ, doesn’t anybody remember anything about my fucking life?”
Abbie began to drive down Elmwood.
“Okay, I’m coming. Just stay there until I come. Don’t go
anywhere
, you hear me?”
The line went dead.
T
HE
B
OWL WAS A SUNKEN CIRCLE IN THE MIDDLE OF
C
AZENOVIA
P
ARK, BETWEEN
Seneca and Potters Road, where three baseball diamonds faced toward the center, one diamond tucked into each corner. The park itself was a huge, wild tangle of creeks, running trails, secret haunts for Abbott Road kids desperate to escape the eyes of their parents.
When she got to the Bowl, she couldn’t see Billy. Plows had piled up mounds of snow and ice, scraped off the streets and dumped on the lip of the circle. And the dusk was coming down fast, sharp shadows stretching out across the snow from the line of trees that ringed the park, the light beginning to turn blue-black.
But once she walked around them, she saw Billy. He was slumped on one of the bleachers, back to her, humped over, his arms folded across his knees and his head lying on his arms.
“Billy,” she called.
No movement. There was no steam from his breath rising above. The air in the Bowl was strangely motionless, the breeze passing above the sunken circle.
“Billy!” she called, snapping back the edge of her jacket and pulling out her Glock. She swept the perimeter of the Bowl. But there was nothing, just an unbroken crust of white snow and shadows coming on fast.
She dropped down the incline into the Bowl and began running. Billy still hadn’t moved. When she was ten feet away, he turned his head.
“Christ, Billy,” she said, exhaling a cloud of steam into the cold air.
He nodded but said nothing.
Abbie climbed up on the cold plastic bleachers and sat next to him, holstering her gun before he could see it. Billy looked terrible. His hair was greasy and frozen into place. He looked like he’d slept in his jeans and the tan Carhartt jacket he was wearing. His boots were unlaced.
“I still have the trophy,” he said.
“The tro—? Oh.” Her brown eyes softened. “State championship.”
“Yep. I pitched a three-hitter. That must have been the game that got me all the scholarship offers.”
Abbie frowned sympathetically.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Billy said. “I didn’t get any of those.”
“Bad grades.”
“Yep.” He looked out onto the field, the pitcher’s mound a hump under the snow, and nodded.
“Tell me about the phone calls,” she said.
“Just breathing, like I said. In the background, I could her music playing and once I thought I recognized the song. And then, the last one, a voice said, ‘Shut your mouth, Carney.’ ”
“Did you say anything?”
“I said, ‘Tell me who you are and I’ll shut yours, permanently.’ ”
He turned to look at her.
“Nice, right?”
It was good to see he had recovered some of his fighting spirit. The Billy on the phone had sounded pretty far gone, a paranoid wreck. Then she saw the bottle of Molson Golden in his hands and realized that he’d been drinking to keep down the jitters.
“I’m going to have someone check your cell phone records. I’m guessing a name didn’t come up?”
He shook his head, took a sip from the Molson. Then he turned to her, and his face was ashen.
“Why’d you turn me in, Ab?”
“I didn’t turn you in, Billy. This has nothing to do with the feds or the Rez or anything like that.”
“Sure it doesn’t.”
“Billy, look at me.”
He stared off at the row of trees, their trunks going from dark green to black as dusk settled over the Bowl.
“
Look
at me, Billy.”
He turned.
“If there are people watching you, it’s because of what you told me in the Gaelic Club the other day.”
Billy’s forehead creased and his eyes opened wide. He crouched over and his face came close to Abbie’s. His breath was sharp with alcohol and Abbie turned away.
“That shit about Jimmy Ryan?”
She nodded. “Yes. But it’s more than just Ryan now. We found another body and it’s the same killer.”
“Who?”
“Gerald Decatur.”
“Never heard of him.”
“It’s the same killer. Believe me, okay?”
Billy’s eyes wobbled. “It couldn’t be,” he said.
Coiled and tense, he began to look around the wide circle, at the mounds of snow enclosing them.
“What else do you know, Billy?”
“What?!” he said, stopping his scan of the horizon long enough to stare at her. “Like I haven’t told you enough already!”
“There’s no one else here. I did a circuit around the Bowl before I came down and found you.”
He looked at her, and nodded. “That’s good. That’s good. But they have all kinds of surveillance equipment. They can trace you by … what are those things called, up in the sky?”
“This isn’t about satellites! Or men in trench coats or black helicopters or whatever else you have in your brain right now.”
“Yes, it is.”
It was growing colder. Abbie shifted to look him straight in the eye.
“Whoever killed Jimmy Ryan and whoever is tracking you is probably someone you went to high school with. They grew up right here in the County. They’ve been to the bar, they’ve bought you drinks, they know the nickname you got when you were eight. And that’s how they’re going to get to you, Jimmy. Because you think they’re your friends.”
He shook his head and took a long pull on the bottle.
“It’s impossible, Ab.”
“If you want them to stop tailing you, tell me what you know about what happened in that back room at the Gaelic Club.”
Billy’s head dropped and he was still for a moment.
“If this really is about them—”
He stopped and stared at Abbie. His eyes looked exhausted, sick.
“About who?” said Abbie.
Billy closed his eyes.
“The Clan.”
“The
Klan
?”
He smiled for the first time, but his eyes looked spooked when he opened them.
“Not the one you’re thinking of,” he said quietly.
“You’re telling me there’s another one?”
“I gotta go, Ab,” he said.
Abbie grabbed his arm. “Don’t make me shoot you, Billy.”
He looked at her bare hand, small against the rough sleeve of his XXL Carhartt, then into her eyes. Then, gently, he pulled her hand away.
The sun had gone down and the shadows were creeping out from the treeline. Billy shivered, and then slid down to the ground, his boots making a loud noise as they broke through the crust of ice.
“Billy?”
He turned to look at her. His face, she thought, had gone from fearful and defiant to haunted.
“I have somewhere I can take you.”
He smiled thinly. “No, you don’t, Ab. There’s nowhere you can take me. You should know that.”
“Just get in my car and I’ll make sure you’re safe.”
He turned and began to walk away. He stuck his hands in the Carhartt jacket and leaned forward as he climbed the incline back to the street.
“What is the Clan, Billy?”
The wind caught his hair and blew it back straight. He didn’t turn back.
“Goddamn it all to hell,” Abbie said, pounding the bleacher. The hollow sound echoed dully through the Bowl.
A
BBIE WOKE IN THE
S
AAB, PARKED OUTSIDE OF
124 D
ORRANCE
L
ANE
. I
T
was the last registered address of Billy Carney, but he hadn’t shown all night. She checked her watch: 8:43 a.m. The last time she’d checked it had been 7:30 a.m. There was a chance Billy could have slipped by her in the past hour, but if so, he was now safely sprawled on his bed, breathing toxic alcohol fumes into his bedroom air.
She tried to stretch in the cramped car. Her back felt like it was made of Legos, put together by a careless child. Her fingers and toes were cold, along with the tip of her nose.
The first thought that came to her was the Clan. Just what was it and what did Billy mean by saying there was no running from it? The likelihood of anyone in the County telling her was next to zero. She needed an authority of some sort, an expert on the County’s secret clubs and associations, the ones that had been brought over from the old country and given new blood. And there was only one place for that that was not connected to the neighborhood itself: the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.
Abbie started up the Saab, made a left on Abbott, stopped at a Tim Hortons for hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll, and then began the twenty-minute drive to downtown.
The Society was nestled on the edge of Delaware Park, a much
nicer one than scraggly Cazenovia, kept well groomed by city taxes and the donations of the old-money families who lived around its edge. It was housed in a big marble building that looked like a Greek temple and backed onto a small lake where birdcalls echoed in summer. Abbie had been there half a dozen times during her school years, for the obligatory class outings. There was the Historical Society, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the fort that gave Fort Erie its name, and that was about it. When they visited the Historical Society, her classmates had snuck out to the lake to smoke or to meet the boys from the other schools scheduled for the same day, but Abbie would wander through its dark, chilly halls looking at each exhibit, even reading the little plaques beneath the Indian handicrafts and the pictures of cholera victims. Something drew her to it. Perhaps, not having a past herself, she was fascinated by the city’s rich and largely forgotten history.