The Unquiet

“You were a friend of Daniel Clay’s. He wants to find him. Maybe he figured you’d know where he was.”

“If I knew where he was, I’d have told someone long before now. My question is, how did he know to come looking for me?”

“I found out about you and Clay easily enough. So could Merrick.”

“Yeah? Well how come that the night you came to see me, the car Merrick was driving at the time was seen outside my property? You know what I think, you fucking asshole? I think he followed you. You brought him to my door. You put my family at risk, all for a man who’s long dead. You prick!”

I hung up. Harmon was probably right, but I didn’t want to hear about it. I had enough baggage to carry already, and too much on my mind to worry about his painting or his anger at me. At least the damage confirmed my suspicion that Gilead was Merrick ’s ultimate destination. I felt as if I had spent a week wading through mud, and I regretted the day that Rebecca Clay had called me. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for anymore. Rebecca had hired me to get rid of Merrick, and instead he was roaming wild. Ricky Demarcian was dead, and the use of my gun made me culpable in his killing. According to the police, Demarcian had been involved in child pornography, and possibly even the supply of women and children to clients. Someone had handed him on a plate to Merrick, who might simply have killed him out of rage, finding in Demarcian’s shooting a convenient outlet for some of his own anger at whoever was responsible for what had happened to his daughter, or he might have learned something from Demarcian before his death. If he did, then Demarcian was also a piece of the puzzle, linked to Clay and Gilead and abusers with the faces of birds, but the man with the eagle tattoo, the only solid means of identifying those responsible for abusing Andy Kellog and, it seemed, Lucy Merrick, remained elusive. I couldn’t talk to any more of the victims because they were protected by bonds of confidentiality, or by the simple fact that nobody was aware of who they were. And I was still no closer to discovering the truth about Daniel Clay’s disappearance, or the extent of his involvement in the abuse of his patients, but nobody had asked me to do that anyway. I had never felt more frustrated, more at a loss as to how to proceed.

So I decided to place my head in the lion’s mouth. I made a call and told the woman on the other end of the phone that I was on my way to see her boss. She didn’t reply, but it didn’t matter. The Collector would find out soon enough.

The office of Eldritch and Associates was still knee deep in old paper and short on associates when I arrived. It was also short of Eldritches.

“He ain’t here,” said the secretary. Her hair was still big and still black, but this time her blouse was dark blue with a white frilled collar. An overlarge silver crucifix hung from a chain around her neck. She looked like a minister who specialized in cheap lesbian weddings. “You hadn’t hung up so soon, I’d have told you you were wasting your time coming down here.”

“When are you expecting him back?”

“When he comes back. I’m his secretary, not his keeper.”

She fed a sheet of paper into an old electric typewriter and began tapping out a letter. Her cigarette never moved from the corner of her mouth. She had perfected the art of puffing on it without touching it with her hand until it became necessary to do so in order to prevent the dangling column of ash from sending her to meet her maker in an inferno of burning paper, assuming her maker was prepared to own up and claim her.

“Maybe you could call him and let him know that I’m here,” I said, after a couple of minutes had passed in noncompanionable silence.

“He doesn’t use a cell phone. He doesn’t like ’em. Says they give you cancer.” She squinted at me. “You use a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She returned to her typing.

I took in the nicotine-encrusted walls and ceiling. “A safe workplace is a happy workplace,” I said. “I can wait for him.”

“Not here you can’t. We’re closing for lunch.”

“Kind of early for lunch.”

“It’s a busy day. I been run off my feet.”

She finished typing, then carefully removed the letter from the typewriter. The letter was then added to a pile of similar documents in a wire tray, none of which looked like they were ever likely to be sent. Some of those at the bottom had already yellowed.

“Do you ever get rid of any of this stuff?” I asked, indicating the stacks of paper and dusty files.

“Sometimes people die,” she said. “Then we move their files to a storage facility.”

“They could die here, and just be buried under paper.”

She stood and retrieved a drab olive overcoat from a battered coatrack.

“You have to go now,” she said. “You’re just too much fun for me.”

“I’ll come back after lunch.”

“You do that.”

“Any idea when that might be?”

“Nope. Could be a long one.”

“I’ll be waiting when you return.”

“Uh-huh. Be still my heart.”

She opened the office door and waited for me to leave before locking it with a brass key that she kept in her purse. Then she followed me down the stairs and double-locked the main door before climbing into a rusted brown Caddy parked in Tulley’s lot. My own car was down the block. There didn’t seem to be much more that I could do other than to get a bite to eat and wait around in the hope that Eldritch might materialize, unless I just gave up and drove home. Even if Eldritch made an appearance, he wasn’t my principal reason for being there. It was the man who paid his bills. I couldn’t force Eldritch to tell me more about him. Well, I could, but I found it hard to imagine myself grappling with the old lawyer in an effort to make him confess what he knew. At worst, I saw him disintegrate into fragments of dust in my hands, staining my jacket with his remains.

And then a pungent hint of nicotine stung my nostrils, blown toward me by the wind. The smell was peculiarly acrid, heavy with poisons, and I could almost feel cells in my body threatening to metastasize in protest. I turned around. The dive bar at the opposite end of the block from Tulley’s was open for business, or at least as open as it could be when its windows were covered with wire mesh, its windowless door scuffed and scarred, and the lower half blackened where an attempt had been made to set it on fire. A sign at eye level advised that anyone who looked under the age of twenty-one would be asked for identification. Someone had altered the two to make it look like a one.

A man stood outside, his dark hair slicked back, the ends congregating in a mass of untidy, greasy curls just below his collar. His once-white shirt had faded to yellow, the collar unbuttoned to reveal dark stains along the inside that no amount of washing could ever remove. His old black coat was frayed at the ends, the stray threads moving slowly in the breeze like the legs of dying insects. His trousers were too long, the ends touching the ground and almost entirely obscuring the thick-soled shoes that he wore. The fingers that clutched the cigarette were burned a deep yellow at the tips. The nails were long and furrowed, with dirt impacted beneath them.

The Collector took a final drag on the cigarette, then flicked it neatly into the gutter. He held in the smoke, as though draining it of every last iota of nicotine, then released it in wisps from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth so that he appeared to be burning inside. He regarded me silently through the fumes, then opened the door to the bar and, with a last glance in my direction, disappeared from within.

After only a moment’s pause, I followed.