Nocturnes

“My name’s Parker. I’m a private investigator.”

“So?”

“Ray Czabo’s dead.”

“And?”

“Your son is seeing Czabo’s wife.”

“You saying he had something to do with this?”

“I don’t know. Did he?”

Gu

“You’ve got some fucking mouth,” he said.

Casey tried to calm his father down.

“Jesus, Pop, come on. Don’t do this.”

“You got no right to say things like that, you hear me?” said Gu

His son reached out and patted him on the back, gradually forcing the gun down with his right hand.

“It’s okay,” he said. “He didn’t mean anything by it. Let me talk to him.”

Gu

“You watch your mouth,” he told me.

He put the gun back in the waistband of his trousers and walked over to a Dodge with a yawning hood. He slammed the hood down and leaned his hands upon it, his head bowed. His son watched him until he was certain that Gu

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“Your old man visited Czabo. From what I hear, he threatened him. There were witnesses.”

Casey swallowed and shook his head in frustration.

“I knew Ray was following me around. I saw him take some pictures. I tried to warn him off, but he wouldn’t listen. He said I was coming between him and his wife. My pop found out-”

“Found out, or was told?”

Casey reddened. He was, I realized, an even weaker man than he seemed.

“I thought he could get Billy over there to talk some sense into Ray. You know, I do some things for my pop. I look after cars for him. Some of them, well, they may have ownership issues, you know what I’m saying? Ray needed to be warned off, or else things would get really bad for him.”

“Things did get really bad for him. Someone shot him in the head.”

“My pop didn’t do it.”

“You’re sure?”

Casey’s voice lowered.

“He doesn’t need that kind of heat. He’s getting older now. The stuff they say about him, most of it’s not true anymore. He only has a couple of guys on the payroll, and mostly what they do is drive my old man to lunch. He fences some cars, distributes a little pot for the college kids, but that’s about it. He’s small time now, but if they caught him they’d put him away, and he doesn’t want to die in jail. He didn’t kill Ray Czabo. Neither did I. When the cops come calling, we’ll tell them that.”

I looked over at Gu

“He can be a prick but he’s still my father,” said Casey.

His eyes pleaded for understanding.

“And-”

Casey put a hand on my shoulder, as though to guide me away from the garage. I let him do it.

“We lost a guy, Chris Tierney,” he said.

“When?”

“Week or so back. Stabbed in the heart.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar. I recalled a story from the Press Herald about a stabbing in Orono. It hadn’t mentioned Gu

“The story I read said Tierney was mugged in the parking lot of a bar. His body was hidden under trash bags.”

“That’s where they found him.”

“So where did he die?”

“Near here. My father had him moved.”

It explained why Gu

“Any idea who might have done it?”

Casey shook his head.

“Nobody has that kind of problem with my pop. Like I told you, he’s not into all that stuff now.”

I didn’t believe Casey, but it didn’t matter.

“There was a guy,” said Casey. “Billy said he’d seen him around. Thin, kind of greasy, long coat, looked like a bum, but a bum couldn’t have taken out Chris. No way.”

I let him think that, even as I walked to my Mustang and remembered the sound that The Collector’s fingers had made as they danced upon its body.

Detective Jansen called again later that day, when I was about to head over to Two Mile Lake to relieve Angel and Louis.

“You say you were over at Czabo’s place?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“And you left your card?”

“I slipped it under the door. Why?”

“There was no card there when we searched the apartment. The landlord says that he hasn’t been near the place, and his wife told us that she doesn’t have a key. By the way, she spoke highly of you.”

“I’ll bet. Do you like her for this?”

“I don’t like her, period. If Czabo hadn’t been hit more than once, I would have put this down as a suicide.”

“Does she have an alibi?”

“Yeah. His name’s Casey Tillman. He’s a mechanic. He claims they went to New Hampshire a few weeks back for a couple of days’ R amp; R. If the dates match, they may be in the clear. We’re checking it. Tillman says there was no bad blood between him and Czabo. I’m inclined to believe him. The only thing suspect about him is his taste in women.”

I wondered if Jansen had made the co

I thought about Ray Czabo on the way to Two Mile. He was no angel, and his actions in the past had led to him being beaten up more than once, usually with some justification, but it was unlikely that his ghoulish tendencies would lead someone to kill him. I recalled The Collector, standing in the flickering light behind De

Then again, Jansen might be wrong about Ray’s estranged wife, but I didn’t think so. A woman who has just killed her husband, or conspired in his death, is not going to be too concerned about an old injury to him caused by someone else. When Mrs. Czabo reminded me of my first encounter with her husband, the one that had left him with a broken nose, she seemed genuinely aggrieved on his behalf. She could simply have been putting on an act for my benefit, but I could see no percentage for her in that.

All I knew for sure was that Ray Czabo’s death roughly coincided with the appearance of the photograph in the mailbox of the Grady house, and that someone had returned to his apartment after I’d been there, maybe to resume the search for something that had been missed the first time, or to ensure that there was no evidence left lying around. My guess was that, when the cops arrived, the apartment was neat and tidy, and the boxes that I had seen dislodged had been restored to their rightful place.

If all of those events were linked, then a possible conclusion was that one of Ray’s excursions down to Two Mile had coincided with the appearance of the individual responsible for the photo in the mailbox, and that person had killed Ray in order to ensure that he didn’t tell anyone what he had seen. If that was the case, then Matheson had been right all along to worry. Pranksters don’t shoot people with a.22, because it’s hard to laugh with holes in the top of your head. The man-and I had no doubt that it was a man-who placed the picture of an unknown girl at the Grady house was deadly serious about what he was doing.