Dark Hollow Read online

  "Billy Purdue hired a private investigator?" I said.

  My tone betrayed me, for the look of profound unhappiness disappeared from Hamill's face to be replaced by a greedy leer.

  "What's it to you?"

  "I'm interested in talking to anyone who can help me to trace Billy. Who's the PI?" If Hamill didn't tell me, I could probably find out by calling around, assuming that whoever he had hired would admit to working for him.

  "I wouldn't want to get my amigo into trouble," said Hamill, rubbing his chin with a rough approximation of a thoughtful expression. "What's your angle?"

  "I worked for his ex-wife."

  "She's dead. Hope you got paid up front."

  I hefted the pool ball in my hand and thought about letting fly at Hamill's head. Hamill saw the intent in my face.

  "Look, I need some cash," he said, his manner softening. "Let me have something, I'll give you his name."

  I took out my wallet and put a twenty on the table.

  "Shit, twenty bucks," spat Hamill. "What are you, on welfare? It'll cost you more than that."

  "I'll give you more. I want the name."

  Hamill considered for a moment. "I don't know his first name, but he's called Wildon or Wifford or something."

  "Willeford?"

  "Yeah, yeah, that's it. Willeford."

  I nodded my thanks and moved off.

  "Hey! Hey!" shouted Hamill, and I could hear his sneakered feet shuffling across the floor behind me. "What about my extra?"

  I turned back. "Sorry, I almost forgot."

  I put a dime on top of the twenty and gave him a wink as I returned the ball to the table.

  "That's for the crack about his ex-wife. Enjoy it in good health."

  I walked away and headed for the stairs.

  "Hey, Mr. Trump," shouted Hamill at my retreating back. "You hurry back now, y'hear?"

  Marvin Willeford wasn't in his office, a one-desk job above an Italian restaurant across from the blue Casco Bay ferry terminal, but a handwritten sign on the door said he had gone to lunch-a long lunch, obviously. I asked in the restaurant where Willeford usually hung out and the waiter gave me the name of a waterfront bar, the Sail Loft Tavern at Commercial and Silver.

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portland harbor was a thriving center for fishing and shipping. In those days, the wharves would be piled high with lumber bound for Boston and the West Indies. There would be lumber on them again soon, but now that wood was bound for China and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the redevelopment of the harbor, the building of new condos and stores to attract the tourists and the young professionals, was still the subject of controversy. It's hard to have a proper working harbor when folks in tie-dyes and sandals are hanging around taking pictures of one another and eating snow cones. The Sail Loft looked like a throwback to the old days, the kind of place some people liked to call home.

  I knew Willeford to see but I had never spoken to him and knew almost nothing about his past. He looked older than I remembered when I found him at the dark bar, watching the rerun of a basketball game on TV surrounded by sea horses and starfish on the walls. I figured he must be in his early sixties by now, jowly and bald, with a few strands of white hair flicked across his skull like seaweed on a rock. His skin was pale, almost translucent, with a fine tracery of veins at his cheeks and a bulbous red nose pitted with craters, like a relief map of Mars. His features seemed misty and inexact, as if they were slowly dissolving into the alcohol that coursed through his system, gradually becoming blurred versions of their original form.

  He held a beer in one hand, an empty shot glass beside it, and the remains of a sandwich and potato chips lay on a plate before him as he watched the screen above the bar. He didn't slouch at the bar, though; he sat tall and straight, leaning slightly into the rest at the back of the chair.

  "Hi," I said as I took a seat beside him. "Marvin Willeford?"

  "He owe you money?" asked Willeford, without removing his gaze from the screen.

  "Not yet," I replied.

  "Good. You owe him money?"

  "Not yet," I repeated.

  "Pity. Still, I'd keep it that way if I were you." He turned himself toward me. "What can I do for you, son?"

  It felt odd to have someone call me "son" at thirty-four. I almost felt compelled to show some ID. "My name's Charlie Parker."

  He nodded in recognition. "I knew your granddaddy, Bob Warren. He was a good man. Hear you may be moving in on my patch, Charlie Parker."

  I shrugged. "Maybe. Hope there'll be enough work for both of us. Buy you a beer?"

  He drained his glass and called for a refill. I ordered coffee.

  "'The old order changeth, yielding place to new,'" said Willeford sadly.

  "Tennyson," I said.

  He smiled approvingly. "Nice to see there are still some romantics left." There was more to Willeford than long lunches in a dark bar. With his kind, there usually is.

  He smiled and saluted with his new beer. "Well at least you're not a total philistine, son. Y'know, I've been coming to this place for too many years. I look around and wonder how much longer it'll be here, now that they're building fancy apartments and cute little stores on the port. Sometimes I think I ought to chain myself to some railings in protest, 'cept I got a bad hip and the cold hurts my bladder." He shook his head sadly. "So, what brings you to my office, son?"

  "I was hoping you could tell me about Billy Purdue."

  He pursed his lips as he swallowed his beer. "This professional, or personal? 'Cause if it's personal, then we're just talking, right? But if it's professional, then you got your ethics, you got your client confidentiality, you got your poaching, although-and here I'm speaking personally, you understand-you want to take Billy Purdue as a client, then be my guest. He lacked some of the basic qualities I look for in a client, like money, though from what I hear he needs a lawyer more'n a PI."

  "Let's call it personal, then."

  "Personal it is. He hired me to find his birth parents."

  "When?"

  "Month or so back. He paid me two-fifty up front-in ones and fives, straight out of the cookie jar-but then couldn't pay anything more, so I dropped him. He wasn't real pleased about it, but business is business. Anyway, that boy was more trouble than arthritis."

  "How far did you get?"

  "Well, I took the usual steps. I applied to the state for nonidentifying information-you know, ages of the parents, professions, birth states, ethnicity. Got zilch, nada. The kid was found under a cabbage leaf."

  "No birth records at all?"

  He held up his hands in mock amazement, then took another huge mouthful of beer. I reckoned it took him three mouthfuls to a glass. I was right.

  "Well, I headed up to Dark Hollow. You know where that is, up north past Greenville?" I nodded. "I had some other business up by Moosehead, figured I'd do Purdue a favor and carry on some of his work on my other client's time. The last guy who fostered him lives up thataways, though he's an old man now, older than me. His name's Payne, Meade Payne. He told me that, far as he knew, Billy Purdue's was originally a private adoption arranged through some woman in Bangor and the sisters at St. Martha's."

  St. Martha's rang a bell, but I couldn't remember why. Willeford seemed to sense my struggle. "St. Martha's," he repeated. "Where that old lady killed herself last week, the one who ran away. St. Martha's used to be a convent and the nuns took in women who had, you know, fallen by the wayside. Except now all the nuns are dead, or Alzheimered out, and St. Martha's is a private nursing home, strictly low end. Place smells of pee and boiled vegetables."

  "So no records?"

  "Nothing. I looked through whatever files remained, which wasn't a whole lot. They kept a record of the births and retained copies of the relevant documents, but there was nothing that matched Billy Purdue. It didn't go through the books or, if it did, then somebody made sure to hide the traces. No one seemed to know why."

  "You talk to this wom
an, the one who arranged the adoption?"

  "Lansing. Cheryl Lansing. Yeah, I spoke to her. She's old too. Jeez, even her kids were getting old. All I seem to meet is old people-old people and clients. I think I need to make some young friends."

  "People will talk," I said. "You'll get a reputation."

  He laughed to himself. "Can you be a sugar daddy without having any cash?"

  "I don't know. You could try, but I don't think you'd get very far."

  He nodded and finished his beer. "Story of my life. Dead folks get more action than I ever did."

  So Cheryl Lansing was the woman who had arranged Billy Purdue's adoption. She obviously had more than a professional interest in him if she was still trying to help out his ex-wife and his son three decades later. I pictured the bag of clothes, and the box of food, and the small wad of bills in Rita Ferris's hand. Cheryl Lansing had seemed like a nice woman. The news of the two deaths would hit her hard, I thought.

  I called for another beer and Willeford thanked me. He was pretty stewed by now. I felt like a great guy, getting him so drunk that he wouldn't be able to work for the rest of the day just so I could satisfy my crusading urge.

  "What about Cheryl Lansing?" I pressed.

  "Well, she didn't want to talk about Purdue. I kept at her but it was no use. All she would say was that the mother was from up north, that she arranged the adoption at the request of the sisters, and that she didn't even know the woman's name. Apparently, she made some money brokering adoptions for the nuns and passed on a portion of the proceeds to them, except this one was pro bono. She had a copy of a birth certificate, though, but the parents were John and Jane Doe. I figured there had to be a record of the birth somewhere."

  "What did you do?"

  "Well, through what Payne could tell me and by checking the records, I found that most of the people who fostered Billy Purdue also came from up north. Farthest south he got was Bangor, until he left for Boston when he was old enough. So I asked questions, put up notices with approximate dates of birth, even took out an advertisement in some of the local papers, then sat around and waited. Anyway, the money had run out by then and I didn't see as how Purdue would be able to come up with any more.

  "Then I got a call, saying I should talk to a woman in the old folks' home up in Dark Hollow, which brought the focus back to St. Martha's." He paused and took a long slug of beer. "Well, I told Billy that I might have something and asked him if he wanted me to continue. He told me he had no more money, so I told him that, regrettably, I would have to terminate our business relationship. Then he chewed me out some, threatened to smash up my office if I didn't help him. I showed him this-" He pushed back his jacket to reveal a Colt Python with a long, eight-inch barrel. It made him look like an aging gunfighter. "And he went on his way."

  "Did you give him the name of the woman?"

  "I would have given him the coat off my back to get rid of him. I figured it was time to beat a strategic retreat. If I'd retreated any faster, I'd have been going forward again."

  My coffee was cold in the mug before me. I leaned over the bar and poured it into a sink.

  "Any idea where Billy might be now?"

  Willeford shook his head. "There is one more thing," he said.

  I waited.

  "The woman in St. Martha's? Her name was Miss Emily Watts or, least, that's what she called herself. That name ring a bell with you?"

  I thought for a while but came up with nothing. "I don't think so. Should it?"

  "She's the old lady who died in the snow. Strange stuff, don't you think?"

  I remembered the full story now. The deaths of the men at Prouts Neck had forced it from the forefront of my memory.

  "You think Billy Purdue went to see her?"

  "I don't know, but something spooked her enough to make her run off into the woods and kill herself when they tried to take her back."

  I stood and thanked him, then shrugged on my overcoat.

  "It was my pleasure, son. You know, you look something like your granddaddy. You act like him too and you'll give no one cause to regret meeting you."

  I felt another pang of guilt. "Thanks. You want me to give you a ride somewhere?"

  He shook his glass to order another beer, and called for a whiskey chaser as well. I put down ten bucks on the bar to cover it, and he raised the empty glass in salute.

  "Son," he said, "I ain't goin' nowhere."

  It was already growing dark when I left the bar and I pulled my coat tightly around me to protect myself from the cold.

  From off the harbor a wind came, running icy hands through my hair and rubbing my skin with chill fingers. I had parked the Mustang in the lot at One India, a corner of Portland with a dark history. One India was the original site of Fort Loyal, erected by the colonists in 1680. It only survived for ten years, before the French and their native allies captured it and butchered the 190 settlers who had surrendered. Eventually, the India Street Terminal was built on the same spot, marking milepost 0.0 for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada and the Canadian National Railways, when Portland was still an important rail center. At One India, now occupied by an insurance company, it was still possible to see the sign for the Grand Trunk and Steamship Offices over the door.

  The railroads had been gone for almost three decades now, although there was talk of rebuilding Union Station and reopening the passenger railway from Boston. It was strange how things from the past, once thought lost and gone forever, should now be resurrected and made vivid once again in the present.

  The windows of the Mustang were already beginning to frost over as I approached it, and a mist that dulled every sound hung over the warehouses and the boats on the water. I was almost at the car when I heard the footsteps behind me. I began to turn, my coat now open, my right hand making a leisurely movement toward my gun, but something jammed into the small of my back and a voice said:

  "Let it go. Keep them wide."

  I kept my hands horizontally away from my sides. A second figure limped from my right, his left foot curved slightly inward, distorting his walk, and took my gun from its holster. He was small, maybe five-four, and probably in his late forties. His hair was thick and black over brown eyes and his shoulders were wide beneath his overcoat, his stomach hard. He might even have been handsome, but for a harelip that slashed his soft cupid's bow like a knife wound.

  The second man was taller and bulkier, with long dark hair that hung over the collar of a clean white shirt. He had hard eyes and an unsmiling mouth that contrasted with the bright Winnie the Pooh tie neatly knotted at his neck. His head was almost square, set on wide, rectangular shoulders, with the barest hint of a neck intervening. He moved the way a kid moves an action figure, loping from side to side without bending his knees. Together, the two made quite a pair.

  "Jeez, fellas, I think you may be a little late for trick or treat." I leaned conspiratorially toward the shorter guy. "And you know," I whispered, "if the wind changes direction, you'll be left that way."

  They were cheap shots, but I didn't like people sneaking around in the mist poking guns in my back. As Billy Purdue might have said, it was kind of rude.

  The shorter guy turned my gun over in his hand, examining the third-generation Smith & Wesson with an expert's appreciation.

  "Nice piece," he said.

  "Give it back and I'll show you how it works."

  He smiled a strange, jagged smile.

  "You gotta come with us." He waved me in the direction of India Street, where a pair of headlights had just flashed on in the darkness.

  I looked back at the Mustang.

  "Shit," said Harelip, with a look of mock concern on his face. "You worried about your car?"

  He flicked the safety on my gun and fired at the Mustang, blowing out the front and rear tires on the driver's side. From somewhere close by, a car alarm began to sound.

  "There," he said. "Nobody's gonna steal it now."

&nb
sp; "I'll remember you did that," I replied.

  "Uh-huh. You want me to spell my name for you, you let me know."

  The taller guy gave me a shove in the direction of the car, a silver Seven Series BMW, which moved over to us and swung to the right, the rear door popping open. Inside sat another handsome devil with short brown hair and a gun resting on his thigh. The driver, younger than the rest, popped bubble gum and listened to an AOR station on the car stereo. Bryan Adams came on as I climbed into the car, singing the theme song from Don Juan DeMarco.

  "Any possibility we could change the station?" I asked, as we drove off.

  Beside me, Harelip prodded me hard with his gun.

  "I like this song," he said, humming along. "You got no soul."

  I looked at him. I think he was serious.

  We drove to the Regency Hotel on Milk Street, the nicest hotel in Portland, which occupied what was once a redbrick armory in the Old Port. The driver parked in back and we walked to the rear entrance on Fore Street, where another young guy in a neat black suit opened the door for us before speaking in a mike on his lapel to advise that we were on our way up. We took the stairs to the top floor, where Harelip knocked respectfully at the end door on the right. When it opened, I was led in and brought to meet Tony Celli.

  Tony sat in a big armchair with his shoeless feet on a matching footstool. His black stockings were silk and his gray trousers were immaculately pressed. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a white collar and a dark red tie marked with an intricate pattern of black spirals. Gold gleamed at his white cuffs. He was clean shaven and his black hair was neatly combed and parted to one side. His eyes were brown beneath thin, plucked eyebrows. His nose was long and unbroken, his mouth a little soft, his chin a little fat. There were no rings on his fingers, which lay clasped in his lap. In front of him, the TV was turned to the nightly financial report. On a table beside him lay a pair of headphones and a bug detector, indicating that the room had already been searched for listening devices.

  I knew Tony Celli by reputation. He had worked his way up through the ranks, running porn shops and whores in Boston's Combat Zone, paying his dues, gradually building up a power base. He took cash from the people below him and paid a lot of it to the people above him. He met his obligations and was now regarded as a hot tip for the future. I knew that he already had a certain amount of responsibility in money matters, based on a perception that he was gifted with financial acumen, a perception he now reinforced with his striped shirt and the attention he was paying to the stock prices that flashed past at the bottom of the screen.