Nocturnes

“A progressive rock compilation. I’m trying to get in touch with my muse by listening to music from my past.”

I was almost afraid to ask. Almost.

“You have a muse? What is she, some kind of community service muse? Did the court order her to help you?”

Angel chose to ignore me.

“I’m considering writing my memoirs. I mean, I’m go

“You ever hear of the guy who wrote it?”

There was a pause.

“Nope, least not until I bought his book.”

“So why do you think he’s a bestselling writer if you haven’t heard of him?”

“There’s a lot of people I haven’t heard of, doesn’t mean to say that they’re not what they say they are. Says on the cover he’s a bestselling writer.”

“So what’s he written?”

There came the sound of pages being flipped in a thin, overpriced book.

“He’s written-”

“Yep?”

“Hey, I’m looking. He’s written…Okay, he’s written a bestselling book on how to write bestsellers. That what you wanted to hear? Happy now?”

I heard the sound of a book being cast to one side with some force. Still, I figured he’d retrieve it as soon as I hung up the phone, but he probably wouldn’t get much further on his memoirs than the first chapter. I certainly hoped that he wouldn’t.

“This surveillance thing you want me to do, it’s on a house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“An empty house?”

“Yes.”

“What did the house do: spy on its neighbors?”

“I suspect it of stealing underwear from clotheslines.”

“Knew a guy who did that once. He’d steal them, clean them, fold them, then deliver them back to the house with a note describing all the work that he’d done, with some care tips for the owners. He told the judge he was worried about hygiene. Judge advised the prison governor to let him work in the laundry. We had the cleanest overalls in the state. Starchy too.”

Angel had spent too long in prisons; a lot of hard time. He rarely spoke about them, and it was rarer still that he joked about them. It meant that he was happy in his life, for the moment, and for that I was grateful. He had endured a lot in recent months.

“That’s a nice story. You about done?”

“Doesn’t sound like a job looking at an empty house has too many prospects.”

“If you turn out to be good at it, we’ll promote you to a job watching occupied houses. Look, no offense meant, but you’ve burgled enough properties. You must have some experience of watching them.”

“Nice. You call me up, ask for my help, and now you insult me. Got any other skeletons from my past you want to throw in my face?”

“It would be like emptying a crypt. I don’t have that kind of time.”

“How much does this job pay?”

“A dollar a day and all the peanuts you can eat.”

“Salted or roasted?”

“Salted.”

“Sounds good. When can I start? And, hey, can I bring a friend?”

My next call was to Clem Ruddock. Clem retired from the state police a couple of years back and, like some cops do, bought himself a bar in a place where the temperature never dipped below seventy in winter. Unfortunately for Clem, he was living testament to my belief that some people are just born to die in Maine. He never quite settled in Boca so he sold a half share in the bar to an ex-cop from Coral Gables and headed back north. Now he divided his time between Florida and a duplex in Damariscotta, near his daughter and his grandchildren. Clem’s answering machine told me that he wasn’t home, but left me with a cell phone number to try instead.

“What are you, a surgeon?” I asked him, when I eventually got through to him. “What does a retired guy need a cell phone for anyway?”

He was driving. I could hear the purr of his engine in the background.

“I guess you didn’t hear,” said Clem. “I took up pimping to make ends meet. Got me some girls in a trailer off 295. I’m thinking about franchising, you got some money to spare.”

“I’m sorry, my money’s all tied up in monkey porn. It’s a growing market. You got time to talk?”

As it turned out, Clem was on his way down to Portland to meet with his lawyer. Sometimes things work out that way. I arranged to meet him for a hamburger lunch in Rosie’s down in the Old Port. He told me I was cheap. I told him that he was paying, so I was even cheaper than that. After all, I wasn’t the one with two homes, and a bar in Florida.

Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a magazine and nibbling on a bagel. Walter was waiting midway between his basket and Rachel, clearly keen to try his luck at scamming some food from her plate but reluctant to risk being shouted at for his trouble. When I came in, he seemed to decide that the balance had suddenly tipped in his favor, and used sniffing my hand as a pretext to close in on the table.

“You’ve been feeding him scraps again,” said Rachel, without looking up.

“What did you do, shine a light on him until he broke down and confessed?”

“We’re sending out mixed signals. It’s confusing him.”

“He’s just confused by why you don’t love him as much as I do,” I said.

“Oooh, that’s low. Is that how you plan to earn the love of your child, with bribery and treats?”

“Start as you mean to continue. It worked with the dog. And with you.”

I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll be back for di

Her eyes drifted toward the inside of my jacket. The butt of the gun was just visible to her, but she made no comment.

“Just be careful,” she said, and returned to her magazine. As I left the house, I looked back and saw her slip a piece of bagel into Walter’s mouth. He rested his head on her lap in return and she stroked him gently, her eyes no longer on her reading but staring through the kitchen window at the marshes and the trees beyond, as though the glass had turned to water and she could see once again the face of the drowning man beneath its surface.

The Collector was looking for Ray Czabo. The name had come up in the course of The Collector’s own investigation into the Grady house, and he was anxious to talk to the man in question. He made no moral judgments on Voodoo Ray’s gruesome hobby: in his experience, human beings were capable of far worse than stealing mementos from crime scenes. What interested him was the possibility that Ray had found a way into the house, and that perhaps he had managed to secure a trinket for himself in the process. If it was the right kind of souvenir, then The Collector’s work would be done.

But Ray Czabo was proving difficult to find, and there was now a stranger in his house. The Collector usually believed in adopting the direct approach, but the young man who appeared to be servicing Mrs. Czabo in her husband’s absence looked troublesome. More to the point, The Collector had discovered that this was a case of “like father, like son,” and that Mrs. Czabo’s lover enjoyed the protection of a small but efficient criminal operation.

The Collector had been careless, assuming that his old car and his run-down appearance would allow him to pass u

“You want to tell me what you’re doin’?” said the man. He was slightly overweight, and wore a black leather jacket and blue jeans. His face bulged in all the wrong places, as though every bone had been broken and then badly reset. His name was Chris Tierney, and he had a reputation as a hard man, an enforcer. The Collector had no time for this. He tried to slip by but Tierney pushed him back, advancing a step as he did so.