Jimmy spun around suddenly and moved toward me. I felt sure that he was going to take a swing at me. I stood and kicked the kitchen chair away, tensing for the blow, waiting to block it if I had time to see it, but it did not come. Instead, Jimmy spoke calmly and deliberately.
“Then it’s a truth that they didn’t want you to know, and one that can’t help you. They loved you, both of them. Whatever this is, whatever you think you’ve discovered, leave it alone. It’s only going to hurt you if you keep searching.”
“You seem very sure of that, Jimmy.”
He swallowed hard.
“Fuck you, Charlie. You need to go now. I have things to do.”
He waved a hand in dismissal and turned his back on me once more.
“I’ll be seeing you, Jimmy,” I said, and I knew that he heard the warning in my voice, but he said nothing. I let myself out and walked back to the subway.
Later I would learn that Jimmy Gallagher waited only until he was certain that I would not return before making the call. It was a number that he had not dialed in many years, not since the day after my father’s death. He was surprised when the man answered the phone himself, almost as surprised as he was to discover that he was still alive.
“It’s Jimmy Gallagher.”
“I remember,” said the voice. “It’s been a long time.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but not long enough.”
He thought he heard something that might have been a laugh. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Gallagher?”
“Charlie Parker was just here. He’s asking questions about his parents. He said something about blood types. He knows about his mother.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, th B athe line,en: “It was always going to happen. Eventually, he had to find out.”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I’m sure that you didn’t, but he’ll come back. He’s too good at what he does not to discover that you’ve lied to him.”
“And then?”
The answer, when it came, gave Jimmy his final surprise on a day already filled with unwanted surprises.
“Then you might want to tell him the truth.”
CHAPTER TEN
I SPENT THAT NIGHT at the home of Walter Cole, the man after whom I’d named my dog and my former partner and mentor in the NYPD, and his wife, Lee. We ate dinner together and talked of mutual friends, of books and movies and how Walter was spending his retirement, which seemed to consist of little more than napping a lot and getting under his wife’s feet. At 10 P.M. Lee, who was nobody’s idea of a night owl, kissed me softly on the cheek and went to bed, leaving Walter and me alone. He threw another log on the fire and filled his glass with the last of the wine, then asked me what I was doing in the city.
I told him of the Collector, a raggedy man who believed himself to be an instrument of justice, a foul individual who killed those whom he considered to have forfeited their souls due to their actions. I recalled the nicotine stink of his breath as he spoke of my parents, the satisfaction in his eyes as he spoke of blood types, of things that he could not have known but did, and of how all that I had believed about myself began to fall away at that moment. I told him of the medical records, my meeting earlier that day with Jimmy Gallagher, and of how I was convinced that he had knowledge he was not sharing with me. I also told him one thing that I had not discussed with Jimmy. When my mother died of cancer, the hospital had retained samples of her organs. Through my lawyer, I’d had a DNA test conducted, comparing a swab taken from my cheek with my mother’s tissue. There was no match. I had not been able to carry out a similar test on my father’s DNA. There were no samples available. It would require an exhumation order on his remains for such a test to be carried out, and I was not yet willing to go that far. Perhaps I was frightened of what I might find. After discovering the truth about my mother, I had wept. I was not sure that I was ready to sacrifice my father on the same altar as the woman I had called my mother.
Walter sipped his wine and stared into the fire, not speaking until I was done.
“Why did this man, this ‘Collector,’ tell you all of this, all of the truths and half-truths, to begin with?” he asked. It was a typical cop move: don’t go straight to the main issue, but skirt it. Probe. Buy time in which to start connecting small details to larger ones.
“Because it amused him,” I replied. “Because he’s cruel in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine.”
“He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who drops hints lightly.”
“No.”
“Which means he was goading you into acting. He knew you couldn’t let this slide.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that, from what you’ve told me, he’s used other people like this before to achieve his own ends. Hell, he’s even used you. Just be careful that he’s not using you again to flush someone out.”
Walter was right. The Collector had used me to establish the identities of the depraved men he was seeking so that he could punish them for their failings. He was cunning, and absolutely without mercy. Now he had hidden himself away again, and I had no desire to find him.
“But if that’s true, then who is he looking for?”
Walter shrugged. “From what you’ve told me, he’s always looking for somebody.”
Then we came to it.
“As for this blood thing, well, I don’t know what to say. What are the options? Either you were adopted by Will and Elaine Parker, and they kept that from you for reasons of their own, or Will Parker fathered you by another woman, and he and Elaine raised you as their own child. That’s it. Those are the choices.”
I couldn’t disagree. The Collector had told me that I was not my father’s son, but the Collector, from my past experience of him, never told the truth, not entirely. It was all a game to him, a means of furthering his own ends, whatever they might be, but always leavened with a little cruelty. But it might also have been the case that he simply did not know the entire truth, only that something in my parentage did not add up. I still did not believe that I had no blood ties to my father. Everything in me rebelled against it. I had seen myself in him. I recalled how he had spoken to me, how he had looked at me. It was different from the woman I had known as my mother. Perhaps I simply did not want to admit the possibility that it was all a lie, but I would not accept such a thing until I had irrefutable proof.
Walter walked to the fire, then squatted to stab at it with the poker before speaking again.
“I’ve been married to Lee for thirty-nine years now. If I’d cheated on her, and the other woman became pregnant, I don’t think Lee would have taken kindly to a suggestion that we raise the child alongside our own daughters.”
“Even if something had happened to the mother?”
Walter thought about it. “Again, I can only speak from experience, but the strain that would put on a marriage would be almost unendurable. You know, to be faced every day with the fruit of your husband’s infidelity, to have to pretend that this child was loved as much as another, to treat it the same way as one’s own child.” He shook his head. “No, it’s too difficult. I’m still inclined toward the first option: adoption.”
But they had no other children, I thought. Would that have changed things?
“But why keep it from me?” I asked, putting that thought aside. “There’s no shame to it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t an official adoption, and they were frightened that you might be taken from them. In that case, it would have been better to B qen better keep it quiet until you were an adult.”
“I was a student when my mother died. Enough time had passed by then for her to have told me.”
“Yeah, but look at what she’d gone through. Her husband takes his own life, branded a killer. She leaves the state, takes her son back to Maine with her, then she contracts cancer. It could be that you were all she had left, and she didn’t want to lose you as her son, whatever the truth might have been.”